User Generated

I recontextualize everyday objects as my modus operandi. This installation uses the female mannequin as the vehicle for inquiry.

User Generated looks at how an objectifying gaze directly polices the body to maintain and normalize a particular set of sexual and gendered power relations ¹ . To objectify someone is to see and treat them as a thing; a thing that possesses something that is desirable and predictable. Within westernized culture, agency is often connected to beauty and sexual desirability. These operations can undermine a sense of self as it changes how we understand and therefore perform.

User Generated is an installation comprising of two films in dialogue with one another, one sculpture and a written lament. The artwork compares disembodied and embodied experiences of socially constructed roles and demonstrates how these experiences affect a person’s agency. By comparing an embodied performance next to the animated disembodied one, the perception and influence of how we observe others, and how we experience being observed, could be understood.

The first film allows the audience to become the voyeur. For three minutes a mannequin is painstakingly observed with the viewer’s gaze inspecting all parts of its body. The second film records different parts of the mannequin’s body separately. The parts are animated to spin, prance, bounce and blink. Conceptually connecting how parts of a body can be seen as entertaining, titillating, even whimsical, yet within these very prescriptions are understood as lacking any serious purpose.