Artist Bio
Ava Mirage Wanbli (she/her) is a Chicago-based new media performance artist, writer, and educator. Her work explores the self through an interdisciplinary practice across live performance, 3D animation, sculpture, and experimental video game development. Drawing on her fascination with archiving her body through 3D scanning, Ava expands on dialogues around hyper-visibility, hypersexualization, voyeurism, and self-constructed mythologized avatars to channel grief, self-renewal, and intimacy. She has performed and exhibited at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (Madison, WI), Chicago Artists Coalition, Hyde Park Art Center of Chicago, DePaul Art Museum. She is a recipient of the 3Arts Make A Wave Artist Award and 3AP Artist Projects , and was named one of Newcity Magazine’s Breakout Artists of Chicago in 2024.
Artist Statement
Ava Wanbli is a multidisciplinary artist working across live performance, experimental video games, sculpture, and new media. She uses each medium to understand and record the body as it exists both physically and virtually. Drawing on her experience as a trans woman, she examines hyper-visibility, desire, and the ways identity is performed and perceived today.
Her work centers on self-creation through mythologized and hyperbolized versions of the self. Ava examines archetypes that occur in displaying aspects of herself in both vulnerability and empowering acts of a desired future. Using real-time rendering, 3D scanning, motion capture, 3D printing, and video animation, she builds speculative environments where these identities take form and shift fluidly in the cycle of deconstruction and reconstruction.
Ava approaches live performance as ritual, a way of cyclically making and remaking herself. Her performances move between intimate emotional exchange, 3D-scanned recreations of her archived body, and physical gestures . Throughout, she holds emotional presence as her body is shaped by voyeurism, grief, and rage, while moving toward self-actualization, intimate connection, and self unification.
Her sculptures, printed from the same 3D models that populate her animations and game spaces, act as physical interfaces and traces of performed works. Each encounter with the work adds to a shared, living archive. Through these interactive mythologies, Ava proclaims a self that is expansive yet fragmented, and invites viewers to recognize their own inner archetypes in a collective process of becoming something new.
