Genur.art

arskiara, An intimate portrait shot on 35mm film, T2, framed through a theater dressing-room mirror so that we see her face in the glass while the blurred crown of her real head enters the bottom of the frame. She is slender, in her twenties, still in costume after the last show: a crushed ivory smoking jacket over a wrinkled dress shirt, collar open, the mole on her throat catching one of the bulbs. Her hair is nearly black, half combed out of its stage set, pinned loosely at the sides, the rest falling in heavy strands over one shoulder. In the reflection her eyes are blue and slightly red-rimmed, lids bare where she has already wiped away the foundation, and she is mid-motion lifting a cotton pad to one eye. The stage makeup that remains reads as archaeology: a heavy line of kohl still welded to the upper lashes, cream contour smudged at the hairline, a pale streak where the brow was drawn up but her real brow, with its small pale scar, shows underneath. The mirror is bordered by round bulbs, some dead, giving a lopsided ring of warm light that throws flat, unflattering illumination at close range and glints in the glass. Around her: a steamer radiating wet heat, a taped shoebox of insoles, a paper cup, a marked script with a spine cracked open, a hanger of the next act's costume blurred at the right. The color is amber and cream with a single hard specular hotspot in the glass. The mood is that exhausted private minute after applause, when the character has gone and the actor hasn't arrived.