Final project for Video Art at St. Lawrence University. As I’ve gotten older, and felt the pressure of society tugging at my hips and prodding my face, it has come to my full understanding just how poignant female body image issues really are. While browsing Facebook or Buzzfeed, it’s not five minutes before you come across some activist campaign pointing out what “real women look like” or how “Lorde has spoken out against Photoshop and says imperfections are okay”. It seems therefore that a backlash is beginning to arise, against the thin preferences that had gained thigh-gap wide popularity. Is it working? Not really. I still feel there is this immense thin privilege dragging us all back to the incessant pinching and pulling at our skin in the mirror. Which is why I wanted to make this video. I wanted to examine the way I look at the mirror; what am I actually perceiving, or perhaps, what am I actually feeling as I stare at my reflection. In my opinion, we are a passive vessel and the reflection we see is not merely a return of light waves from a shiny surface, it’s a voice. The conflation of ideals regarding Neoliberalism’s push for individual responsibility and self control molded by the media’s manipulative hand. We are conditioned to believe that through the conscious choice of personal restraint we are lubricating the system instead of acting as sticky economic burdens. Thus, “Healthism” emerges and thin is now equated with healthy and to be healthy is to be beautiful. And so regardless of evolutionary underpinnings on attractiveness and fertility, if we don’t look a certain way, if we don’t fit into a certain size, we are doing something wrong and it is our own fault. This is what my reflection is telling me. It tells me to grab at my skin and yank at the fat beneath and repeat after me: it’s too much, you aren’t doing your part, this is what you need to change. And I accept everything, because it is what I have been manipulated to understand as the truth. Looking at Abril’s, Thinkspiraiton Fanzine: Chapter Two, it became even more apparent that the push for thin has evolved to an obsessive level. Abril created a chilling photo series taken from the “Pro-Ana” community where she reinterpreted the images to exemplify the destruction that results from such a debilitating lifestyle. In the description of her work, she notes how the piece is “a personal and introspective journey across the nature of obsessive desire and the limits of auto-destruction” . I was really inspired by this, and felt the need to undertake a journey of my own in attempting to deconstruct a similar body image dilemma. In order to try to accomplish this, I drew upon some artists that we learned about in class. I was really interested in Bill Viola’s, The quintet of the astonished, because of the way he portrayed the minute movements of emotion . I found it beautiful and painstaking, which was something I wanted to evoke in my own project. Willie Doherty’s piece, Non-specific Threat, pulled ideas on power dynamics and an intimate portrayal of the character while using a voice over to establish some tensions between external and internal voices . This was some of the main inspiration for my idea, I really wanted to attempt to capture a character the way he did, in an almost raw form, and also utilize the voice over technique to achieve a narration to bring the images together in a more cohesive way. I was also intrigued by Dan Graham’s use of mirrors and competing temporalities in Present Continuous Past(s) as well as Pipilotti Rist’s focus on the contours of the body . Compiling all of these inspirations together, I came up with the bathroom scenario. I purposefully picked the pallid blue, callous bathroom tucked awkwardly into the corner on the third floor of Richardson to house my piece. My character wore simple, minimal clothing as to sort of bend in with her surroundings. In some of the close up shots, I tried to call upon Viola’s exaggeration of facial movements by focusing in on an eye blinking or little toes squirming on a cold tiled floor. In having the voice over, I hoped to add another dimension to the images and to help give them a more rooted meaning while creating an almost painfully intimate atmosphere, similarly to Doherty. Finally, the body scanning pulled heavily from Rist’s work, an attempt to provide unusual angles and textures that weave and fold together in an abstract interplay of pale blues and sallow skin tones.
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 02:47:51 +0000
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