In this site-specific installation, fellow Seattle artist Tiffany Danielle Elliott and I created a conceptual design to explore how the female body exists in space; we exaggerated the impact of the gallery on our work as a representation of how an unyielding environment impacts the female body by requiring compliance and adaptation. Juxtaposing four repeating static works on paper (my work) with four repeating projected videos on canvas (Elliott's work), we turned the multiple restrictions and challenges of the actual gallery space into commentary regarding the lack of integrated awareness of body/mind/self and lack of emotional attunement. Each nuance of the installation questioned different elements of psychological presence; the projected videos were changed weekly to indirectly respond to audience interaction. Whether literal or suggested, our bodies became a giant rorschach test as audiences scrutinized, projected and revealed differing capacities for engagement. We alternated an embodied image, which moved, breathed and blinked, with a static, defaced and depersonalized painting asking audiences to move between the concretized and the abstract in terms of how we think about and interact with bodies in space. The live body was rendered more "offensive" as audiences were pulled in but then threatened by the proximity and life of the image, though the paintings represented actual female nudity, "fully clothed" in abstraction. The title of the installation comes from an article by Marvin Carlson which explored the concept of restored behavior, posing whether cognition and their corresponding actions are performative, authentic or both. He writes, "Performance is always performance for someone, some audience that recognizes and validates it as performance even when, as is occasionally the case, that audience is the self."
36" x 24"
charcoal, pen, colored pencil
Because we constructed such a site-specific and site-directed installation, these paintings were based off a photograph previously denied from exhibition in the same gallery space for nudity. My body, now clothed in abstraction, connected with Elliott’s projections to question whether our artwork (as well as the responses by the audience) were performance, authentic, or both.
36" x 24"
acrylic, colored pencil
I wanted to play with Carlson's idea that pretending to be someone other than oneself is a common example of this restored behavior. This type of performance is not linked to the display of technical skills (what we would normally think of as theater, or “performing arts”) but rather with a distance between the self and the displayed behavior.
36" x 24"
acrylic
This distance between self and projected behavior creates the juxtaposition within the work to communicate the felt distance of who I am and who I display to the world.
36" x 24"
acrylic
Is the/my body still recognizable without the context of other representations? If isolated, would it still be deemed inappropriate nudity? As a final commentary on the gallery which holds endless tension between the disciplines of art and psychology, I wanted to give the most minimal representation of my form as possible.