History in the Making: Reflections on 2019

This work is part of a curated section of 10 artworks that look back on significant events in 2019. You can see more details on all the artwork in this series here. 

Camila Gonzalez Corea uses her unique and highly innovative working method to create a portrait of the USA football striker, Megan Rapinoe, made entirely from emojis. 

With the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup being the most watched in history, Megan Rapinoe took the opportunity to voice her opinion against the US President Donald Trump and female inequality. She vowed to fight for equal pay in her industry and to be a voice for the LGBTQ community. 

As a result, Megan and her girlfriend Sue Bird, a professional basketball player herself, made international headlines including being featured on the Oprah Winfrey show. Their work continues with a strong line up of meetings to come with major political figures in the USA to speak about the inequality issues that need fixing.

The artist Camila Gonzalez Corea comments on Megan as a role model, "As a woman who grew up in a football family and played football for 11 years as a child, I know how important it is to be encouraged to continue doing it - how important it is to have idols which show me that it is possible to succeed as a woman in this particular sport.

I can say from personal experience that this does not come easy, this is something I did not have. You constantly see football idols for boys, not to girls. I went from training five hours a day to zero, not because I wanted to, but because I did not see a future in it as a woman. Let’s not let this happen to anyone else.

Following the world cup, this project aims to shine a light into amazing female athletes and to convert people like Megan into their idols and remind them not to give up."

Camila's artistic practice involves recreating photographs with a montage of emojis. This approach begun in a protest series titled The Nipple Act where the artist turned images of breasts into emoji collages to circumvent Instagram's censorship of the female nipple.

The intention was to protest against what the artist saw as the "sexist terms of use, which allows male nipples to be published on the platform, but bans the posting of female nipples".

Accolades
Central Saint Martins, MA in Fine Arts, 2018. 

Awards
Winner of The Signature Art Prize, People's Choice Award, 2018. Nominee of MullenLowe NOVA Award, For Fresh Creative Talent, 2018. Nominee of The Tab Future 100 - UK's Most Impressive Female Student, 2018. 

Selected Exhibitions
The Signature Art Prize, Trinity Art Gallery, London 2019. B00bs, Karl Oskar Gallery, Berlin 2019. Stolen Hearts, M&C Saatchi, London 2019. Bjetos Pequeños: Una Muestra De Equipaje, Nos Vemos, San Jose 2018. g_URL Techno-Utopia Screening, Sluice Art, London 2018. Latin American Myth Deconstruction, The Crypt Gallery, London 2018. The Neoprotofeminist show, 74 Rivington Street, London 2018.