ESSAY FROM:
CarianaCarianne: Relational Compositions, Ispace Gallery, Chicago, IL, 2008
Relate(to)us
Julie Rodrigues Widholm
Pamela Alper Associate Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art-Chicago
Visual comparisons are at the fundamental level of learning to look. We usually begin by noting oppositional visual characteristics (like/unlike) as a form of comparison, most often using ourselves as the central point of reference. (She is shorter, taller, older, smarter, etc. than me). Relational Compositions suggest how we might modify such strategies to find new and more complex ways of seeing, thinking, and relating.
CarianaCarianne�s ongoing body of work, called Relational Compositions, is an investigation and representation of twoness within one being. CarianaCarianne (American, b. 1971) is the name of two individuals, Cariana and Carianne, who occupy one body and are collaborators. To be expected, this notion is difficult for many to accept. However, as I wrote in a previous essay �They are not conjoined twins, not a split personality, not a multiple personality, not suffering from a Jekyll and Hyde condition.� For viewers to fall into a trap of preconceived notions and stereotypes of insanity would be to miss the profound metaphors within their work to which anyone can relate on a most basic human level.
To allow one�s self to be open minded and enter into CarianaCarianne�s world, which is one that they inhabit fully within and outside the �art world,� (it isn�t in any way �an act�) is to leave safe and familiar territory for something that may be discomforting at first. Yet, the concept in much of their work is rather simple; namely, to encourage empathy for what we do not know, in our own lives and on a global scale. In Relational Compositions, CarianaCarianne ask several important questions pertinent to this idea. Is it possible to be both the participant and observer simultaneously? Can the perspective of the self become �We� instead of �I�? Can the dichotomies around which our world seems to revolve (e.g., good/evil, right/wrong, sanity/insanity, Democrat/Republican) find, at times, an acceptable middle ground? Can deeply embedded systems of language, laws, and other social codes be challenged for a greater good? Can people accept using the pronoun �they� in reference to one body? CarianaCarianne have certainly tried.
Relational art is a term developed by French curator Nicolas Bourriaud to describe a kind of recent art practice concerned with the interaction between art and the viewer. Similarly, in the 1960s Brazilian artist Lygia Clark created �relational objects� that directly engaged the viewer�s body. In Relational Compositions the interrelationship of central interest is that between Cariana and Carianne, who directly engage legal matters of life, of death, and of the skin � all of which act as a veil between the self and these experiences.
Inherent to any relation or relationship is a past or a history. In fact the etymological root of relate is the Latin relatus (the past participle of a word that means to carry back), to tolerate or to bear our connections with others. The artists� own personal history, of surviving debilitating familial relationships and becoming a ward of the state at the age of 16, fuels the art they create and imbue a genuineness to concerns that are real to them in every way, shape and form. They have been very close to death, so to make wills, as in Management of Expectations: How does one become what one is? , and write obituaries, as in Slow Happenings, is simply acknowledging and taking control over elements that surround the inevitable. The strong sense of agency over their identity and their body is a way to recapture that which was unwillingly taken from them. Their work represents a struggle that many people face on a daily basis- being who they are meant to be, in spite of what is perceived to be �normal.� CarianaCarianne seek to hold onto the last kernel of their authentic self, through artistic explorations of representing doubling and legal recognition of the same, while conventional social forces conspire to destroy it.
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