ALCHEMATRIX

2013

The self-portrait performance was originally done as embodied research into the Russian folkloric witch character, Baba Yaga. Closely related to the ancient Scythian sun goddess, Tibiti, Baba Yaga sometimes has a gold leg. Here the artist's entire body is covered in gold leaf and gestures are enacted that reference both madness and seduction, qualities every witch is understood to possess. The .gif format was used for its endless repetitive nature, referencing obsessive acts and the inability to ever complete them. Amelia Jones, in Body Art; Performing the Subject, states:

Precisely because feminist body artists enact themselves in relation to the long-standing Western codes of female objectification (what Craig Owens has called the “rhetoric of the pose”), they unhinge the gendered oppositions structuring conventional models of art production and interpretation (female/object verus male/acting subject) … reiteratively exaggerating it beyond its veiled patriarchal function of female objectification.1

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Alchematrix was displayed in miniature on an iPhone within the upper floor of a separate work, Izbushka. One of the Alchematrix series was also published as a photo in Perle magazine for the Montreal Erotic Art Festival exhibition.

Reference:
1. Jones, Amelia. “The Rhetoric of the Pose: Hannah Wilke and the Radical Narcissism of Feminist Body Art”, Body Art; Performing the Subject. 1998. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. pp 151-152.