Ava Mirage Wanbli (b.1989) is a Chicago based new media performance artist. In ritualized actions, Ava addresses consumption and the production of the self through an interdisciplinary practice of performances, sculpture, new media , and real time rendering engines. Ava uses 3D scanning as a way to archive her own body in its process of becoming while utilizing live performance to engage with hyper sexualization, voyeurism, consumption of bodies and representations of personal and collective histories as a trans woman. Her work has been supported in a solo exhibition at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison, Wisconsin and Depaul Art Museum in Chicago. She has attended ACRE Residency and has received the Make A Wave Artist Award by 3ARTS organization in Chicago. She has recently been featured as one of the ten New City 2024 Breakout Artists of Year in Chicago.


    In modalities of authorship, I reconstruct eroticism around my body as a way to recontextualize identity, positionality, and accessibility within consumption of a persona economy. I interweave technology within my practice to address aspects of trans women narratives, voyeurism, labor, sex, consumerism, and how we engage with virtual representations of each. I primarily communicate by a hyperbolized mythos in world building as an interactive experience.


    My art practice has always approached mediums as a generative ritual to deconstruct and reconstruct my own body. In the first years of my transition I began focusing more on the self as material to cathartically unlock different variations and potentialities of myself. I always intend to create a modular set of sensorial experiences to access differing aspects of the subconscious to evolve as a trans woman, artist, and a personhood that desires new systems of expression in her future.