The Secret

The Secret, part of Cecilia Paredes’s ongoing photographic series, “Paisajes,” suggestively camouflages the artist’s own body against intricate and ornamented backgrounds. Painted with great detail, her skin merges seamlessly with the rich, green-and-beige wallpaper that surrounds and covers her. The floral, decorative pattern of the paper suggestively brings nature and the feminine body together, even as it threatens to occlude her form. This seeming displacement of her body alludes to the forced migration—and subsequent adaptations and adjustments—of people around the world. Both landscape and self-portrait, The Secret probes universal questions of being and belonging and of finding one’s place in today’s global and diasporic society.

Text credit: Produced in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and by Gemma Kim