June 04, 2007
June 2007 on -empyre- soft-skinned space
Constructions of Identity: Performance Life
June 2007 on -empyre- soft-skinned space: "Constructions of identity: performance life" with Barbara Campbell (AU), Jill Magid (US) and Stacia Yeapanis (US). Please join our guests for a month's reflection and debate; subscribe here.
This month on -empyre- will concentrate on the construction of identity among artists who have explored notions of 'feminine' identity at one point or another - especially how it relates to space and landscape. The emphasis of the discussion will focus on the play between 'real' and 'virtual' space, as it is so much a part of the everyday and a powerful tool for artists to promote and create their works. The discussion will also focus on how curators have worked with artists with these concerns.
Barbara Campbell is a performance artist who has worked with the contextual properties of all kinds of sites since 1982. Back then, her sites were physical: galleries, museums, stairways, atriums, piers, to name some. At the moment her performance site is actually a website. "But I don't think this qualifies me as a new media artist. In fact I waited until the internet acquired the patina of age before I became really interested in it, because then it became possible to discern user patterns and the messages of the medium itself. Community, distribution, globalisation, interactivity, citizen-media, were some of those messages, and these are what I'm employing now." Barbara's current project is 1001 nights cast, in which she performs a short text-based work for 1001 consecutive nights. The performance is relayed as a live webcast to anyone, anywhere, who is logged on to http://1001.net.au.
Stacia Laura Yeapanis is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Chicago, IL. She received her MFA from the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. Her work can be seen in the Museum of Contemporary Photography's Midwest Photographers Collection and in the Rhizome Artbase. Stacia is an avid Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan and has two wonderful cats, Gertie and Gloria.
Everybody Hurts, a hybrid fansite/conceptual art piece exploring mediated emotion and the fansite as a performance of identity; My Life as a Sim, documentation of this ongoing project on my portfolio site; Commercial-Free: The Museum of TV on DVD, another hybrid fansite/conceptual art piece exploring fandom in relation to museum curation.
Jill Magid: "I seek intimate relationships with impersonal structures. The systems I choose to work with- such as police, secret services, CCTV, and forensic identification, function at a distance, with a wide-angle perspective, equalizing everyone and erasing the individual. I seek the potential softness and intimacy of their technologies, the fallacy of their omniscient point of view, the ways in which they hold memory (yet often cease to remember), their engrained position in society (the cause of their invisibility), their authority, their apparent intangibility and, with all of this, their potential reversibility."
Posted by jo at June 4, 2007 08:28 AM
