Working in a number of media, the subject matters I explore focus on individuals and groups of people on the periphery of dominant culture and I enter their contexts to work from a position of inclusion that approaches, as closely as possible, the residing dynamics of social and psychological forces. I have developed several large projects over the last decade:The Bathers, Mirror Series, Missing Women: Disappearing Acts, Selling Venus/Vénus au miroir, Projections, Sisters of the Cross, Pilgrims, and Erlking.
Selling Venus/Vénus au miroir originated in a striptease club in Osaka, Japan and took me to the Crazy Horse in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Using photography and video, I recorded back-room rituals of beautification to explore the female gaze as it divides inwardly and outwardly in the frame of a make-up mirror. Selling Venus/Vénus au miroir investigates the process of subjectivity as it simultaneously coalesces and fragments in gesture and ritual, calling attention to the performative acts of self-transformation that women enact every day. The subjects I collaborated with in Selling Venus/Vénus au miroir are of all ages, races, cultures and backgrounds, and I entered their contexts to work from a position of inclusion that approached, as closely as possible, the residing dynamics of social and psychological forces.
Over the course of the last six years, I have been developing a project that explores questions of subjectivity among a group of catholic nuns. In the Sisters of the Cross project, I propose to unveil the hidden and profound lives of this disappearing sisterhood. I created the first chapter of the project in Winnipeg and in 2009 I started a second and third chapter through collaboration with Sisters of the Cross in Brazil, Argentina, and France, where I lived with the sisters for over two months. While conveying the stillness that defines the home of the nuns, this project makes visible a rapidly disappearing community that typically goes unseen. Sisters of the Cross includes a series of photographs, a four channel video installation with sound diffusion, fourteen votive cards printed as multiples of watercolour portraits of the nuns, an artist book of collages, and a collection of handmade postcards that were a collaboration with the sisters. In this body of work I am interested in creating an atmosphere where stillness and temporality become tangible, a meditation on the texture of slowness, the nature of listening, and the relationship between attention and time.
Throughout my artistic practice, I have been fascinated by the representation of the “other” — a figure both real and imagined — and the ways in which this figure embodies our deepest fears, our suppressed longings, and the infinite complexities of human life. The oil paintings, watercolours, and ink drawings in Pilgrims, explore notions of the “unbeautiful” and how the unbeautiful becomes permissible, and even desirable, under the guise of performance and public display. The work draws primarily from the sideshows of the early twentieth century and 1950’s burlesque. The performance group The Abzurbs, of which I am a founding member, also informs these paintings. Our collective merges burlesque, performance, music, and visual art, evoking the grotesque through absurd and purposeless play. In Pilgrims, the mask and the act of performance play important roles as vehicles of self-transformation. By transforming their physical selves, the subjects in Pilgrims are unfettered by the weight of the familiar and free to inhabit, albeit temporarily, their fantasy selves.
My fascination with the representation of the other, the marginal figure, turns inwards in my newest work Erlking. This project stems from a desire to dive into the unconscious, where I, and the other become mixed, disordered, divested and dislodged. My studio research for Erlking draws from psychoanalysis and the literary work of Angela Carter, whose use of magical realism, surrealism, and feminist critique, are strategies for celebrating the marginal and diverse. Recasting the roles of the freak and the deviant, I aim to evoke personas in flux that are both titillating and repulsive. In order to create this travelling circus of the imagination, I aim to unbind myself from the known and the familiar, a state of being that cannot be willed into being, rather, it requires a complete letting go. Finally, my innate curiosity of the psychic territory of the subject compels me towards a deeper investigation of extreme expressions of selfhood as both a strategy for celebrating alterity and as a metaphor of the vast continuum of potentialities that exist within each of us.
To worry or to smile, such is the choice when we are assailed by the strange; our decision depends on how familiar we are with our ghosts. (Julia Kristeva)