The tourist is prepared to leave behind all notions of reality to submerge themselves in and with paradise, an imagined landscape.
In the ‘Visions of Paradise’ series the viewer becomes voyeur, traveling with Paradise through imagined landscape. As Paradise explores the vernacular of tourist economy, she acts simultaneously as guide and protector. She is not native, nor is she foreign-she shapeshifts as she explores the slippery complexities of tourism. The tourist themselves are spectacles of contemporary colonialism. They expect to be relieved from the mundane tasks of everyday life. While on vacation they attempt to immerse themselves in the culture of other-protected from the context of their regular lives, they gain a taste for the “exotic”. But what is truly exotic? What if they are just caricatures of themselves? Only the native knows.
