Maya Man: StarPower

StarPower is all lavender, pink, and sparkles, like a dance studio. Projections of heavily made-up girl dancers perform as if they were born knowing exactly what the camera wants. Synchronized to perfection. They hit the mark. They are the mark.

It's only when you go home and pull up an episode of Dance Moms, the reality TV series that inspired the work, that you realize something's missing. Where are the back-biting confessionals? The unhinged mothers screaming from the wings? The girls’ young bodies still figuring themselves out?

Maya Man grew up around the competitive dance world. In StarPower, she runs the model through AI, which keeps what performs, discards the rest, and hides the dancers’ identities behind the brand.

There are subtle distortions: an extra limb, an impossible extension, a body overly optimized for balance and spectacle. Motivational posters line the wall and could only have been written with software support. One reads, "Journey Without Fame is Possible. Dance Hard, Life's Big." Not wrong, just uninhabited.

Influencers spend years engineering themselves for a life online. Man skips the human part entirely. There's only what to do and what not to do — and those who are the best at it might turn out to be robots.

Maya Man (b. 1996 in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania) lives in Chinatown and works in SoHo, New York. She began in the competitive dance world at age three. Before attending UCLA’s Design Media Art Program, she worked as a Creative Technologist at Google Creative Lab. Nowadays, she moves between building an audience online and making art. This is her first solo show at the gallery.