THE SELF COLLECTIVE

The technological advancements of visual and social media provide new opportunities for connectivity. We have access to new platforms upon which self-representation comes into contact - and perhaps conflict - with others in a reciprocal exchange of performance and perception.(1) The body is a crucial means by which we enact and display how we understand
ourselves, and a subject to be perceived and consequently interpreted by others. In physical spaces and on digital screens alike, we are engaged in a constant process of both reiterating our own identities (2) and interpreting the body-situated performances of others.

 

The selected works ask how we navigate these interactions in relation to what is imposed upon our bodies by the structures within which we exist. The artists assembled use different mediums to consider the body as a site of identity, and technology as a means of expressing exploration of these themes and as the site at which constructed identity is performed.

Radchuka, through unconventional framing of the self on social media, invited virtual connections into a physical space. She utilized a pre-existing social platform, but her methods of both self-presentation and interpersonal engagement on that platform subverted its norms. Her strangely cropped and ambiguous self-portraits isolated and enlarged individual parts of her body- when placed in the gallery space, these images and Mercedes’ video installation were visually comparable and somewhat echoed each other. The only partial access to her physical appearance that she provides through these pictures echoes Amelia Jones’ discussion of body art as revealing the “insufficiency and incoherence of the body-as-subject”(3) and the very limited understanding of another individual one can gain through observation of their body. Her indiscriminate acceptance of every potential “match” and her (partially veiled and initially ambiguous) intentions - to invite them all to attend an art exhibit - constituted a digitally situated performance that contrasts with the intended and normative use of the platform she chose - i.e. a polarized yes-or-no response to another individual based on the attractiveness of their self-representation via self-curated images with the aim of finding sexual/romantic partners. While part of the sequence of images revealed that her Tinder account had been suspended due to its nonconformity and the number of viewers who had reported it, her desire to bring virtual connections into the physical realm was fulfilled when an attendee revealed she had found out about the show via a conversation with Rad’s profile.

Kathleen Reichelt’s installation considered the clothing worn in public spaces - what the greater social body imposes upon the physical body of an individual. This piece was an outlier in the exhibition in several ways - not only was the artist the only one selected from outside the UOttawa Visual Arts program (and thus outside the curators’ group of friends and peers) the medium of fabric-based sculptural installation, the bright pink colour, and the almost satirically vintage styling of the clothing items all contrasted with the more contemporary and primarily technological nature of the rest of the collection. However, the sculpture provided an important visual variety to the show as a whole, extending the discussion of identity into a different and more material dimension.

Katarina Tkaczyszyn’s collection of virtual information, which she suggests is both an aid and threat to identity-construction, combined digital projection with live performance. For the vast duration of the three-hour exhibition, she sat enclosed by steel bars, writing down what she refers to in her statement as “given truths” as a scrolling page of various images, reminiscent of social media websites, was projected onto the screen built into her enclosure, wrapping around her. In her statement, she referenced philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of “enframing”. The ambivalence of the dependent relationship on technology that her somewhat claustrophobic piece communicates also recalls what Ann Wagner refers to as “the problematic real of technologically mediated experience”.(4)
 

The video installation by Sabrina Chamberland explored gendered attributes of the face and the jarring ambiguities that ensue when they are altered through juxtaposition. It was the largest-scale projection in the show, the images fading into one another, shifting and mutating on a giant scale, creating an extremely eerie effect. In this piece, technology is the vehicle for
exploring pertinent questions about physical embodiment of identity and the instability of the body/self and the “intertwining of self and other”(5), and it is also what creates and mediates a tension-filled interaction of bodies. This piece illustrated how the social sphere can distort conceptions and constructions of self - the abject in the interpersonal.

Utilizing both digital and sculptural materials to create conversing portraits, MercedesVentura discussed hair and its styling as a racial signifier. The split-screen dual projection showed herself and her brother as they engaged in a light-hearted personal conversation, but the video was angled and cropped so as to only show each person’s hairline - a way to further
visually emphasize the focus of their conversation. This framing device provokes consideration of deliberate choices of self-representation via digital and technological mediums. These mediums are also what provide the audience access to this organic, personal conversation. Headphones mounted on plinths were provided so that audience members could listen in on this dialogue, with attached hair extensions that gave the technological installation of the video in the gallery space an additional sculptural dimension. The piece was specifically focused on an isolated aspect of the physical side of identity

performance, but engaged with both gender and cultural identity as significant aspects of what an individual embodies, and what is read or projected onto them by observers.

This collection dealt with connections and exchanges via a variety of contrasts: between the self and the other, between virtual and material embodiment, between the ephemerality of physical performance and the continuum of digitally projected loops. The installation of these pieces in a physical space where they could be viewed, engaged with and interpreted by an audience can also be considered a performative act like that which the included artwork seeks to both enact and investigate - the creation of a reciprocal connection where, in the words of Jones, "the body/self is simultaneously both subject and object”.(6)
 

 

(1)Amelia Jones. Body Art/Performing the Subject (1998): pg. 41
(2) Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993): pg. xii
(3) Jones: pg. 34

(4) Ann Wagner. “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence”. October Vol. 91 (2000): pg. 76
(5) Jones: pg. 38

(6) Jones: pg. 41

 

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Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). New York:Routledge

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Ross, Christine (2011) “The projective shift between installation art and new media art: from distantiation to connectivity”, in Screen/Space: the Projected Image in Contemporary Art, ed. Tamara Trodd, New York: Manchester University Press, pgs. 185-205

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