The body is now a hothouse of distortion and disassociation.
No longer merely a sensory entity, commodification has led to an inseparability from the material and informational flow.
Through hypnotic automatic perception, the abuse of power in acts of viewing works to transform living matter into a grotesque, dysfunctioning reflection of being.
The more the individual observes representations of the living, the less they live. The more they agree to recognise the images of organic matter, the less they understand their own existence and desires.
The Third Body, 2023, Mixed media, Dimensions variables
This work is a mixed-media video animation of a textured bodily tunnel. The texture of the tunnel was created from a scan of an oil painting (Flesh,2023). The physical act of painting went through a digital manipulation and became a digital texture. The camera travels inside the artificial body and creates an invasive internal gaze.
The grotesque body is one that spills into the world and floods it, obliterating its boundaries. This recalibration of object relations engages the body as it tries to gauge whether the artificial entity is a source of threat or attraction—perhaps both.
When bodies overflow, or when parts are severed from the whole, they become something unsettlingly Other. Such experience renegotiates the borderlands between image and flesh and between the vibrant and the inanimate, rupturing any buffer that keeps the consciousness of mortality at bay.
This feeling of abjection is often a blade’s edge away from erotic desire. Such expressions of temptation suggest a calling to sense, to exist beyond the cognitive and aesthetic: self-regeneration as a form of transgression.
Within this recognition of the flesh, organs, offal, and the grotesque become a portal through which systems of power dissolve. Bodily invasions act as an awakening force, puncturing a finger into an open wound. This bodily wakefulness contains violence and arousal, asking for the senses to claim the human experience once again.
Flesh,Oil on foam board, 93 cmx42 cm
The Third Body, 2023, Mixed media, Dimensions variables
Tate Modern, Tate Late, Beyond Surface, 2023
The Third Body, 2023, Mixed media, Dimensions variables
Surface, 2023, Mixed media, Dimensions variables
The Third Body, 2021, Mixed media, Dimensions variables
