Practical Illustrations of Body Configurations

Practical Illustrations of Body Configurations in Architecture, Conical Gallery, live performance with video sculptures, text and drawing, 07/07.

This live performance was a response to the current trend in performance remakes and the problems of documenting performance. The performance was structured as an art history essay. Loosely, I remade works by Dan Graham, VALIE EXPORT and Mike Kelley solely from black and white photographs and written descriptions and then I made an artwork in response to their work, which carried on their logic using my own visual language.

Sticky Dimensions

Alex Through the Looking Glass, video projection onto paper stack, Seventh Gallery, 2005.

This is a video of my cracked and breaking nails violently tapping a mirror. The video was then projected onto a paper stack that was intended to reference a book with no binding (a formless body). Tapping nails: the sound of the manicured woman: I converted this rhetorical gesture of ‘boredom’ into a painful choreography so that it is understood as a gendered performance. The projection onto paper confounds the sound of the nails on the mirror, hopefully dragging the viewer away from hypnosis into an alert and critical state.

Sticky Dimensions, Studio 12 Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, two channel video installation, 02/07.

This installation perceptually expanded Studio 12 via two projections of the same image mirroring eachother on two opposite walls of the gallery. The video was made onsite, illusionistically extending the space exactly half as long on either side of the room. Simultaneous to this visual extension of the space a conceptual collapse of its dimensions brought my projected body closer to the audience. Filmed from the centre of the room, the two projections describe the surface of the screen as a real boundary. Conceptually, the two screen walls are brought forward to the centre of the room where the viewer stands.

Alex Through the Looking Glass