THE SELF COLLECTIVE
FEATURED WORKS
Sabrina Chamberland, One Two (2014), Video Projection.
There is a certain fragility – a vulnerability – of the human body and our relationship with it that are most fascinating. Our body has the capacity to make us feel most powerful, yet it can just as easily alienate and betray us. It can at once be a place of comfort, an assured aspect of who were are, but can further elicit in us, as well as from our proximus, a great complexity in reactions. But what feeds into the development of these reactions? How are they created? And what do they say about us?
Through examinations of the precarious and visceral qualities of the human form, and the body-mind relationships they can incite, my works aim to explore the conflicting dichotomies that arise from interactions with the represented body, such as attraction and repulsion, bewilderment and fright, comfort and estrangement. Photography, with its direct link to the real, but also for its self-referential quality, is used as a primary tool to materialize a personal and perpetual curiosity of the body’s physical and perceived limits. Notions of abjection, posthumanism, and subjectivity have further informed the manners in which I approach my subjects, constructing and deconstructing, examining all aspects of their composition, outer and inner. Through fragmented studies of the flesh, self-portraiture, and atypical visual juxtapositions, my work further aims to question the body’s relationship to notions of gender, identity, and ultimately, the human condition.
Radchuka, Virtual Web/Physical Web (2015), Performance.
Radchuka is a contemporary artist that is in a constant exploration of the idea of self and identity. The Virtual/Physical Web performance is a project that engages the use of an app that is already in popular use and repurposing it. Radchuka has created a Tinder page, along with a Facebook page under the name of Oge Repus. This name comes from the word Super Ego, spelt backwards. The symbolism of this name comes from Fraud’s believe that the superego is a symbolic internalisation of cultural regulations and in this piece the cultural regulations are called into question, in a way reversed.
Oge Repus is represented by photographs of the body, images that abandon traditional figurative representational photography and instead embraces micro shots that create an abstracted representation of the self. Curiosity arises from the unconventional use of the app and conversations spark, now here we are, connected physically just like we are connected virtually.
A Delicate Thing (2015) is an installation that responds to identity through the language of dress and points to ways in which clothing as convention traps and catches. This is an interpretation of body as human and extends to the greater social body where clothing is enforced. The positioning of the suit and bathing top draws attention to the flattening out of singularity, and the colour and shapes reflect an ongoing dialogue around identity as feminine and part of a particular culture. The net is a simple technology with an amphibological relation to virtual space.
Kathleen Reichelt, A Delicate Thing (2015), Installation.
Katarina Tkaczyszyn, Enframing Gestell (2014), Performance, Installation
Enframing - Gestell is based on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, where the concept of “enframing”, in and of itself, is defined as a mode of revealing the world where nothing appears in its essential character. Tkaczyszyn is interested in how the understanding the self is correlated to the learning of the reference of things, and how the relationship between humans and technology, specifically, is dependent on the notion of “instrumentality” or “usefulness”.
In Enframing - Gestell, Tkaczyszyn is observing, sitting, writing. She is using all of the elements of her performance as a tool, and in doing so, she is discovering the essence of all that she is using. Social media, specifically, as Tkaczyszyn will come to learn, denotes the essence of suppression. The essence of social media, therefore, posits a danger to the understanding of the self, as the self becomes ambiguous in its reality. Influenced by Heiddegger's philosophical writings, Tkaczyszyn is determined to use herself and her art as a means to navigate through this conflict and restore truth, as Heidegger ultimately suggests that the artist is the only figure that can understand the world as it reveals itself.
Mercedes Ventura, It's Kind of a Hairy Subject (2015), Video Projection and Audio Recording
It's Kind of a Hairy Subject is a dual channel video installation with audio. The piece is a conversation between my brother and I, though the video frame will only show our foreheads. The conversation will be about our hair and our hairlines. In order to listen to the conversation you have to put on headphones that have a stylized hairpiece attached to them.
Hair and hairstyles are an important part of body esthetics within many cultures. It is significant way that identity can be seen, and is seen as a form of determining identity constructions such as class and race. It is also a way of creating culture and self-identification. Many cultures and sub-cultures use hair as a way of expressing themselves and as a way of communicating their esthetic values to the rest of the world. Grooming and hairstyling vary from culture to culture. As biracial individuals, being Hispanic on our father’s side and White Canadian on our mothers, we carry characteristics from both a minority culture and the dominant white culture here in Canada. Our hair and our hairlines are one reflection of those biological characteristics. Our conversation will be a recollection on our memories surrounding our hair and a reflection on the grooming and upkeep that we do in our everyday lives. It will create a living portrait, one that is playful because it defies standard formatting of video and the conventional practices in photographic portraitures. This is a lighthearted way to present the video that reflects the honest and relaxed conversation between my brother and I.
The work will be insight into how we negotiate our identities with our hair. We would like to invite you to join in the conversation by wearing the hairpiece provided and perhaps contemplate your own identity.