SELF-less.

Group Exhibition Proposal.

The mirror taught me what I had always known: I was horribly natural.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots.¹

Concept.

Today, we can record and reproduce ourselves not only as images, but as systems of data measuring everything from heart beats to mood fluctuations and sleep cycles. We are capable of creating the most accurate, fully sized 3-dimensional replicas of ourselves, and are comfortable utilizing extensions of our being as Facebook members and avatars on Second Life. Unlike our ancestors peering fearfully into tin-backed pieces of glass and wondering at the face staring back at them, we understand self through various technological representations. Yet, these endless extensions, demand of us an unrelenting pursuit of newer and more defined identities, asking us to disclose all our whims in personal profiles of favorite movies, books, travels, and food preferences. While technology offers us new and unprecedented means of sharing and community building, it also leaves us vulnerable and exposed to commodification. Consumed by constant self-study, our self-awareness stands dangerously close to a focus group. Our self-images are hunted by the market, and re-purposed for advertising. In this context, we would like to ask – how do we simultaneously reveal and protect that “horribly natural”, vulnerable self?

Proposed as a group show for the 2012 exhibition cycle at the Aarhus Art Building, SELF-less puts together works of ten emerging artists from USA, Cyprus, Ukraine, and Colombia, and features videos, photographs and drawings. At times unsettling and grotesque, subtle and beautiful, works included in the SELF-less proposal converge under the themes of primitive animalistic self complicated by the constructs of identity. Oscillating between irreducible sense of I (the subject) and contextual Me (the object), ten artists take the notions of identity and ego for a playful ride. Unafraid to temporarily abandon their sense of individuality, and to explore and expand other possibilities for themselves they, in a sense, become SELF-less. The new multitudinous ego comes about not as a declarative rebellion, nor as a new construct, but as a flow, a constant flux of slow and intensified self-reflection. Adopting psychoanalytical, terms, the ten artists continuously de-construct and re-construct their self-images through various strategies of imitation, role-playing, staging, and fantasy. In the resulting performances, portraits, and documentation, they blur boundaries between factual, invented and adopted identities, mutating and transforming ego as if it were pliable. Often situated in gaps and fissures, overlaps and fractions the bits of self-discovery can be described as radical processes of individuation, legitimizing private explorations of self in a ‘free for all’ space. Brought together as an exhibition, SELF-less enters a public sphere, a place of shared knowledge, where our universal stereotypes, traditions, and habits of understanding ourselves can be collectively re-examined.

Proposed Works.

“We play with margins and borders, unstable and abstract. We dance inside the outside, our bodies ambiguous. We wear costumes, mirror and armor,” – says SKOTE describing their work. SKOTE, a collaborative duo of Jill Pangallo and Alex P. White, utilizes public intervention in existing environments ranging from a business office, a hotel lobby, to a storage building. Momentarily SKOTE becomes a rogue element and in Brechtian fashion erases distinction between visual art and theater, audience and performer, fiction and fact. For instance, performance and video documentation “Destination: Hyatt” opens with a scene of two hooded figures repeatedly riding an escalator up and down while unsuspecting people go on with their routines. Following this scene, a rather strange dance takes place in a corporate office, where SKOTE members climb office chairs and crawl underneath business desk as they try to mold themselves into bleak interior. As a follow up, two amorphous shapes in orange body suits become animated biomorphic sculptures in the corporate lobby of the Hyatt, blending surprisingly well into the environment with its marble polished floor and dark wood walls. In the last sequence of “Destination: Hyatt” SKOTE plays out some ambiguous intimate interactions alluding to private fantasies of hotel guests. They expand the theme of destination and behavioral prescription adding a second video titled “Destination: Tucker”. In this act, SKOTE engages in hotel themed routines performing in a pool, and orchestrating a pop song performance in a conference room. Wherever there are, SKOTE disrupts and undermines reality with absurdity. In their most recent work “Catalog”, SKOTE literally inserted themselves as products and photo models. In this mail order collection, SKOTE performs as each advertised item, – a baby doll, a teen dress, party goods, picture frames, and even as feces-eating prevention pills for dogs. As the catalog spreads change, faces of Pangallo and White recite lines of advertised items in a chanting and psychotic manner. SKOTE’s performances run a constant reminder about instability of our own identities, habits, and perceptions within a consumerism-saturated society.

For the Colombian artist Santiago Forero, normalcy is not a granted concept. Since birth, Forero has had to adapt to the world designed for people of regular height, weight, and body type. For his series “Olympic Games”, Forero regimented extreme diet to modify his body as close as possible to the attributes of an athlete. He then commissioned sportswear designed to match his particular body characteristics. This project resulted in photographic portraits of the artist as an Olympic athlete in swimming, fencing, boxing, weightlifting, hurdling, and other sports. Exploring the exceptionality of his own body, Forero underscores normalcy as a mutable notion dependent on perception and circumstance. Further investigating constructs of an ideal male, Forero photographed himself in heroic roles as a Vietnam-era soldier, a firefighter, a biker, and a rioter, roles which he would not easily be able to embody. In his explorations of normalcy and masculinity, Forero, inhabits a unique position of other in relationship to the rest of the world, yet this otherness is subjected to stereotypical imagery, to dogmatic notion of norms projected by cinema and advertising. This pervasive standardization and regulation becomes a point at which normalcy becomes as unattainable for Forero as for the majority of people. This uniting sense of alienation from the ideal, makes Forero’s work a radical norm which is individualized.

Looking for limits and pathways of individuation, Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli often hires young actresses to examine the very process of becoming a woman, of the continuous self-staging and construct, opening up the role of the actress in relation to the individual’s process of identifying as female. In Lavatelli’s video, “Pink Levitation” a young girl precariously balances in a pink room. Emulating a still frame, the video is looped to prolong and intensify this state of simultaneous suspension and suspense. Pushing the work midway between the cliche signifers of femininity and the unspoken sense of emergence, Lavatelli leaves us wondering whether this is a trap or a state of limbo. The girl’s identity is left bare and non-descriptive, just ambiguous enough to create a void, a free space in which we can compose a new narrative, and construct a character outside of stereotype. In “Pink Levitation” Lavatelli reconstructs a pivotal moment where the subject is inside and outside of herself simultaneously, where identity disintegrates and bodily ego fails to assert itself.

Nothing could be further away from stereotyping than intimate and strange works of artist Maria Pithara. Her constant pursuit of complexity unfolds in the multi-channel video installation “Saturday”. Two girls, a young woman, and an older one interact without dialogue, tending to subtle visual clues. Dressed in colorful thrift shop finds, two women sew womb-like stuffed pouches together, alluding to fertility and womanhood against a backdrop of a poster with a beach at sunset. At one point, two girls cut thick black hair in a bath, as an older woman blows bubbles; at another point, they induce tears with cut onions. Simple actions from blowing bubble gum to painting toenails become obscure rituals of female bonding, power, and nurturing. Searching for invisible threads between forms and processes, Pithara re-creates iconographical histories as subtle and intimate moments of inner human dramas, turning everyday objects into talismans and choreographed gestures into psychologically charged vignettes. Re-occurring themes of death and fertility weave her work into a larger surreal narrative of loss and regeneration in a world that is both internal and external, both constructed by the artist and revealed to her.

Another example of an artist mining existing cultural heritage is Rosemarie Padovano. A daughter of a Catholic nun and priest, Padovano often uses her unorthodox position to explore the spaces between the spiritual, the sensual and the secular. In “Wake”, the artist presents us with the possibility of knowing one’s own death. After learning mortuary make-up from a professional mortician, Padovano staged an image of herself lying in a casket. The scene is convincing, yet, the split image provides conflicting clues to its origins and reasons. One half is true to a traditional wake setting complete with wilting flowers, the other half suggests a makeshift support for the artist’s legs, serving to keeping them warm with a space heater. Caught between moments of staged death and survival in a very cold Brooklyn studio, this image exemplifies the confused state of being. Padovano, gives us at once, an image of her own death and a record of her daily working environment. In another piece titled “Sapling”, Padovano extends the theme of becoming through re-staging a puberty ritual. The photograph captures exact moment when a naked boy is being passed through a split tree by two adults. This passage of the body, once again presents us with possibility of being and not being. The boy’s body is handled much like an object, something not inherently alive, but in the ritual is becoming a man. Padovano often explores transformative powers of rituals where she mines old symbols to explore normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behavior.

The ideas of transience and ever-elusive consciousness permeate the work of writer and animator Brian Zegeer, whose videos are characterized by fractured movements, shifting positions, and imagery oscillating between beauty and cosmological narrative. His process-driven animation titled “Poetics of Ditch-Digging” is comprised of still shots taken while the artist was digging a large hole in a ground. The ghostly and eerie documentation of the digging appears as a makeshift shelter and a grave for a naked human body. The hole seems to be invested with a strange kind of entity as a breathing earth valve. By both simultaneously birthing and absorbing, the ground becomes a metaphor for human experience. Spiritual enlightenment therefore becomes momentary and the physical labor of living is raw and inseparable from the world. Zegeer’s series of drawings, which he often executes while riding on a subway train, possess the same jittery mood of slipping in and out of consciousness. Within the small notebook pages, random clear thoughts are caught within intricate pen marks depicting phantasmagorical creatures and grotesque heroes. Self-effacing and assertive at the same time, Zegeer’s work is sincerely individualistic and introspective, inviting laughter and contemplation as a philosophical combination for being.

Jill Pangallo’s photographs make a fitting contribution to the grotesque qualities of being. From the slightly odd to the alarmingly perverse, her made-up portraits obscure the identities of her models, yet reveal everything closeted from the public eye otherwise. Dealing with the clash between mass culture and identity, she uses 99-cent items as building blocks for constructing suppressed desires, and spelling out hidden drives. Cheap fetish items made out of feathers, knick-knacks, and toys adorn leopard print pants and fishnets, a gift bag makes for a campy head dress, a handshake becomes a foot shake, and a wig turns into a face mask. Using the disposable and discarded, Pangallo constantly re-renders suburban fantasies of glamour and sexuality while using the distinct flavor of reality shows, gossip magazines, and web live feeds. Continuously consumed and constructed, these images offer a point of view that is intensely private as it is garishly populist in her funny and disturbing photographs “Toys”, “Seekers”, “Lucky Charms”, “Hotel”, and “Headshots”.

Taking an altogether different approach, Yui Kugimiya, transports human identity into an animal subject. In her quirky and frank animated paintings, Kugimiya depicts rather simple daily human activities like brushing teeth, talking on the phone and looking at flowers. But, this ordinariness is given a new dimension as these mundane acts get played out by a recurring cat character. Pliable oil paint comes to life as the images mutate into each other, transforming from messy brush strokes into discernible objects and back into playful disarray. Always one step behind these disappearing moments, the artist tries relentlessly to capture subtle changes and create a memoir of daily existence.

In his series of drawings “Devil’s Den”, Phil Whitman weaves together both personal narrative and historical events. A famous site during the Civil War’s infamous Battle of Gettysburg, Devil’s Den has become one of the most popular destinations for visitors. After searching the Internet for source material, Whitman realized that people pose themselves in similar positions at the backdrop of the very same landscape. This led him to investigate his personal relationship to the site, which he often visited in childhood and continued to visit in adulthood. The shared history has become the guidelines for the shared relationship, dispersing identities of the tourists across the historic landscape. Within this site, famous for Confederate sharpshooters, Whitman carefully redraws people posing naked and exposed. By painstakingly redrawing and re-imagining these tourist photographs, he is waging a measured campaign between the public and the private. The time it takes to recreate these images allows him to both commune with and selectively possess his fellow visitors, somehow perhaps recapturing a sense of Devil’s Den as a personal haunt. As the historic memory of the actual violent events recedes into the background, the individuals portrayed by the artist become more and more significant as subjects of his artistic study.

In the video titled “Motherland” the artist Slinko conflates personal history, fantasy, and performance, by reconstructing her immigrant voyage from Ukraine to the United States through a set of abstract performances, void of dialogue and linear narrative. The protagonist undergoes a return journey to visit the place of her birth. The scene unfolds from idyllic landscape to violent mud wrestling, in which the body is thrashed around in the thick and fertile dirt. Suffering a loss of personal identity, the protagonist is on a mission to find her origins, at the exact plot of land, where as legend has it, her ancestors settled over one hundred years ago. She digs deep to excavate possible clues of family beginnings, but eventually finds herself bogged down by thick luscious mud, in which she wrestles an invisible foe. Often revoking her personal history through objects and images, Slinko continuously grapples with her Soviet heritage and her current American life. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: a History (Routledge 2002), p.272