“To Shelves” Exhibition
Momenta Art
This event has ended.
The act of self-portraiture is a performative self-creation both for the artists and their potential audience. While there is a tendency to dismiss the gaze turned toward the self as narcissistic navel gazing, others, such as artist/writer Catherine Lord, take a different perspective. According to Lord, “I didn’t mean narcissism as necessarily a negative thing. Why can’t women (especially) undertake to investigate themselves by making images of themselves without that charge? It seems to me that thinking about oneself at length is a form of entitlement. so why not claim that?” Sharing her perspective with Lord, Silas also claims that “after decades of feminist discourse and political engagement, women making images of themselves is still an act with political ramifications.”
The self-portraits titled motion series and blur series by Joy Episalla included in this exhibition were initiated in 1992, when Episalla started to collect her own hair as a visceral response to the loss of many friends from AIDS. As the pile of hair grew, she began to crochet it. The sculpture took on a conical form, expanding into a widening spiral. In 2011, seeking to re-incorporate the lost material back into herself, she began using the sculpture as an appendage or prosthesis in her self-portraits.
Using daydreaming as a working method, Episalla performed for the camera with this sculptural appendage in a trance-like state over a period of about 8 hours, using the camera’s self-timer to capture the images. In both series she documents her performance for the camera without seeing the recorded self-representations as she is performing. The result is a series of fugitive and amorphous self-portraits that trace her motion, blurring recognition.
Susan Silas’s work in this exhibition is her most recent attempt to turn the camera on herself, peering closely at her aging female body in an act of self-intimacy with her own reflection in the mirror. In untitled video, naked, Silas’s face and upper torso slowly slide across the surface of the mirror, her lips nearly brushing the surface. Her slow movement is disrupted only by the sound of the camera shutter. Accompanying the self-portraits with mirror are two photographs of plaster casts of her face. One was cast in 1992 and another in 2012. Resembling death masks, they are frozen snapshots of the artist’s own decay.
Both artists utilize the act of self-portraiture as an exercise of agency through performative self-creation. If the performative creation and presentation of the self is the exercise of political agency, what are the specific social and political subjectivities they embody through their work? This exhibition leaves this complex question open to the viewer.
Media
Schedule
from March 07, 2014 to April 13, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-03-07 from 19:00 to 21:00