https://wordpress.com/page/lisasookraj.com/443
I was approached by two visual artists to assist with research, writing and editing. I also repurposed content and helped Dana with her SSHRC grant application.
Montreal Artist, Dana Dal Bo
Artist Bio
Dana Dal Bo’s practice is a fusion of her divergent backgrounds in psychology, fibres, photography and modeling. Her work examines scopophilia and the complex relationship between viewer and subject from a feminist viewpoint. The photograph serves as a document of her performance before the lens.
Dal Bo won the Prix du Centre des Arts et Des fibres du Quebec in 2005. She currently conducts research for artist Ingrid Bachmann in the interactive textiles and wearable computing lab at Hexagram in Montreal. Dal Bo’s expertise in this area is evident in the detailed attire that is central to her work.
Residency Proposal for Banff Centre For the Arts
I propose to create the costume for my next performance, the final installment in the Alice/Persephone/Augustine series. These performances explore symbolic spaces and female figures from myth, literature and early psychiatric studies on hysteria. Themes of vulnerability, transformation, and gender as performance are key. The symbolic importance of attire is essential to the series; as Judith Butler states, we ‘wear’ cultural significations.
The final chapter, a duration piece documented on film over the course of 2011, will focus on guilt and shame, submission and authority. In Banff, I intend to build the focal point of this piece — an elaborate beaded, crocheted and woven hat that will dwarf the subject; a merger of a dunce cap and a priest’s hat.
Artist Statement
My images serve as residual traces of my performances before the camera. Similar to Cindy Sherman, I create a scene, inhabit a character and am both the director and subject of my work. The central theme I explore is scopophilia and the gaze, challenging the notion of looking and being looked at.
My process is intuitive. I conduct eclectic research, follow symbols and connect ideas that may initially seem random, but that enrich each other through dialogue. I conflate my interests in narrative, psychology, performance, image and textile. Meticulously crafted sets, props and garments are crucial to my performances, working together to suggest the narrative that has transpired.
I reconstruct universal myths and archetypes using contemporary forms of representation. My individual practice branches out from my collaboration with AN Soubiran, Anadama, The Twelve Positions of the Family; in which we explore intimate relationships using characters from fairy tales and mythology and the environments they haunt. In these surreal, ominous tableaus character and space are conveyed as alive and somatic.
My recent work examines the young female’s transition from the familiar and safe to the foreign and sexual. The raw energy of emotion is prevalent, a sense of exposure within the unsettled space of the self. I am investigating the process of transformation or individuation and the associated guilt, shame and questions of gender that arise. Judith Butler views identity as constituted through stylized acts and gestures reproduced over time. ‘Unruly’ women are threatening subjects who resist and transgress gender norms. My works express the confinement, seclusion, fear, and longing to become a free agent in the world these subjects face.
Alice, Persephone, Augustine: Exhibition proposal
The series I propose to submit is part of an ongoing project which examines gender, agency and metamorphosis. The unifying theme is scopophilia, the Greek term for pleasure derived from looking. The viewer is essential in this work, inspiring the subject to perform. Making a spectacle of oneself is, according to Mary Russo, “a specifically feminine danger” closely connected to a “loss of boundaries”. This is tied to the idea of women’s bodies as more open than men’s… and female ego boundaries as more permeable than male ego boundaries.
My project has been inspired by three characters: Alice of Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Persephone of The Rape of Persephone and Augustine, a 15-year-old patient of the Salpetiere asylum from Charcot and the Reinvention of Hysteria. My series of photographed performances looks at the parallels of these stories. I underwent a full transformation to become a hybrid character, Alice/Persephone/Augustine, in order to examine the individuation process as a girl on the cusp of womanhood leaves her mother and all that is safe and familiar to confront the unknown, foreign and sexual.
My photos act as residual traces of my performances before the lens, interacting with different symbolic spaces: the attic, where women deemed ‘mad’ have been hidden away, the white room, representing clinical isolation and the fall Alice takes down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, and the cellar which acts as the underworld of Greek myth. Central to my images is the notion of ‘haunting’ space, as women have ‘haunted’ the historical stories we associate them with.
Key symbols found in the sets include: Lego, which signifies childhood play, innocence, construction/deconstruction of gender, pomegranates which are symbolic of loss of innocence, and thimbles—which though originally used for sewing, were also used by prostitutes to tap on windows to signal their presence and by Victorian schoolmistresses to tap on the heads of rowdy students. The mirror denotes self-reflection while the white dress symbolizes virtue and virginity. The effect of the colour is also said to aid mental clarity, encouraging individuals to clear clutter or obstacles enabling fresh beginnings. In the Eastern countries, such as India and China however, this colour is usually associated with sorrow, funerals, and mourning, another form of designating the purity of soul.
Polish Artist, Grazyna Adamska-Jareka
Excerpt from brochure for Becoming Transparent Exhibition
Using the language of painting and drawing, I communicate my desire to grow as an individual and as an artist. The process of introspection is crucial to the transition from a maladapted, inadequate state to feminine wholeness.
Through their diverse methods of depicting figures in conditions of turmoil and conflict, Francis Bacon, Leon Golub, Lucian Freud and Marlene Dumas have inspired my practice.
My subjects are painted on durable plastic film. The paint serves as a metaphor for psychic fragility and instability. The transparent and lightweight qualities of the material reflect a desired state of clarity, a window that reveals the real and true self.
LISA SOOKRAJ 