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ALCHEMATRIX, 2013

Self-portrait performance with gold leaf on skin, rendered as .gif animations.

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

 

Alchematrix was displayed in miniature on an iPhone 4 within the upper floor of the separate work, Izbushka. See Izbushka, here. One of the Alchematrix series was also published as a photo in Perle magazine as part of the Montreal Erotic Art exhibition (2013).

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.

FIXATION STATION, 2011

This work was performed as part of the Hoot and Peep Mini Performance Festival which took place in the Owl's Nest Bookstore storefront window, Fredericton, New Brunswick. The Hoot and Peep Mini Performance Festival was organized in conjunction with Salon Connex, a collaborative project between The Charlotte Street Arts Centre and Gallery Connexion, to inspire dialogue around works of art shown at Gallery Connexion. Performances as part of the Hoot and Peep Mini Performance Festival responded to the exhibition, Tokyo Hotel Story by Nathalie Daoust. 

Fixation Station included repetitive performed actions, such as tracing a slow, circular line of red lipstick from the lips outward until the entire face was covered, making lipstick face prints on the papered wall behind the performance space, consuming sunflower seeds in the shell as well as a spread of fruit that was used to clean the lipstick off, so that the performance sequence could begin again. In the adjacent window, a monitor was set up to display text pieces composed around memories of oral fixation.

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