(Re)Evolving Door

(Re)Evolving Door (installation detail)

Female roles are becoming less clearly defined and increasingly more complicated. Often we are called on to erase ourselves, what our mothers and grandmothers taught us, and recreate ourselves daily. Work a full day, come home, take classes, take care of the family, your husband, yourself, and all the while looking, feeling and being sexy, strong, and focused. Are our hands perpetually tied by all of these expectations? This process can be draining and somehow refreshing and exciting. Do the same ties that bind us also provide a way to hang on? With this recent body of work I attempt to expose the complicated process of how we see ourselves within this contemporary framework.
This series is ongoing and some pieces are interactive. These drawings can be touched, moved, and removed during the duration of installation in order to gain better access to other drawings on the wall and create conflicting shadows. Recurrent in my recent work are figurative elements of women, flowers, and landscape elements that serve as surrogates, which tell the story of both my own experiences and the every woman. The lack of detail and color provides the viewer with almost endless possibilities for connections they make with the image and its movements and shadows. Beginning with the tradition of drawing the figure, I acknowledge the body and my own humanity. I let the drawings sit in my studio till the pose speaks to me, then I “strip” the drawing of everything except it’s shell or contour line. By omitting so much of the detail, the real work of describing my identity formation can begin. Moving and repeating the prototype drawing creates a sojourn inward, tapping into memories of memories, how I’m feeling in the moment, and future expectations. The options are endless and just like the way I imagine or see myself, the drawing is a process in flux.

Relative

Relative (installation detail)

Relative (installation detail)

"Angels" Porcelain angels, marble mortar & pestle, 5 x 7 x 4.5 inches, 2009

One angel conveniently turns her back towards her crushed sister, demurely playing the expected role to the same forces that could destroy her too.

"Save Me" Endless loop video, 2009

Video of a woman repeatedly baptizing herself in the River Jordan. Her halo appears when she emerges from the water and fades as she rises, so she must take another dip. Shot at The Jordan River in Israel, the river in which Jesus was baptized.

Part Sisyphus, part Pollyanna, she willingly, self-righteously and deliriously believes that she can be pure of body and mind, regardless of the fact that this is humanly impossible, and more importantly, impractical. This dream becomes her prison in that she cannot allow herself to enjoy the pleasures and realities of life, including the natural process of making mistakes, growing wiser as a result and laughing at them fondly in hindsight. Who/what does she really need to be saved from?

See a video clip at www.kanderson.tv/SaveMe.html

LAN Party or “National Take Your Daughter to Work Day

In LAN Party or “National Take Your Daughter to Work Day” Noelle Mason grafts autobiographical narrative onto appropriated images, objects, and contexts in an attempt to negotiate the complexities of power, which reverberate between the interpersonal and institutional.  The resulting installation, or local area network (LAN,) implicates the viewer in an act of violence and uses the gallery as a medium to examine the historical precedence that affirms the authority of viewership.  In LAN Party a Remington M700 police sniper rifle is poised atop a domestic looking table.  A stool and headphone set invite the viewer to position herself behind the rifle, aimed at a small ornately framed monitor across the room.  The monitor which, can only be seen and heard when standing in close proximity, shows found footage taken through the lens of an American helicopter sniper as he targets and kills Iraqis on the ground.  The video is accompanied by a telephone recording of Ms. Mason’s father’s voice coolly describing the formal qualities of his own experience with the Remington M700 (weight, material, kickback.)  Outfitted with headphones and enabled by the magnifying powers of the rifle’s scope, the viewer across the room receives the sniper footage in concert with the original soundtrack—the voices of gunmen and the booming sound of shots being fired.

Stills from "Woman on a Swing" by Isabel Reichert and Heike Liss

In the video installation Woman on a Swing, Reichert and Liss explore the relationship between movement, sensation, and subject in cinematography. The video depicts a young woman on a swing; a classic motif suggesting light-hearted and carefree youth, ephemerality, desire, buoyancy.  The subject is seen from behind in an intentionally indeterminate setting, which allows/enables the viewer to project and/or identify.

Although she swings back and forth, however, she always remains in the same location within the frame, and the same distance away from the viewer. The movement and scale of the surrounding frame changes as if the movement is transposed from the subject to the camera frame. This optokinetic stimulation induces a physiological phenomena known as vection, the illusion of self-motion. 

Click here to see a an excerpt from the video

Pipecleaner, 2007

“3D-Pipes,” a kitschy late-90s Microsoft screensaver is the lo-fi setting for a quirky post-feminist intervention. Wearing a dress made out of cleaning gloves, a pole dancer invades the screensaver’s maze of pipes. Her spins, gyrations, and efforts to climb and clean the pipes become absurd when reduced to byte-sized edits that mimic the original screensaver’s recombinant logic.

BLU, 2009

BLU, 2009
Video: 1:10min
Words of desire spin in a demanding hypnotic loop.
http://www.zoechan.com/sculpture/video

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one had, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is ‘I desire you,’ and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion … on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure.” – Barthes, A Lovers Discourse

Let my words work upon you. My words are my body. My words can touch you. Let me touch you with my words. Let my language work into you. Let my fingers touch across your edges. Let them turn you over. Let them turn you around. Smoothly. Gently. I push. I pull. I have your words at my fingertips. I twist you at the edges of my hands. My fingers move back and forth. Back and forth. Up and down. Down and up. Let my body twist you. Smooth and stop. Stop and up. Faster, stop. Back up. Now down. Now down, now down. I work upon you. My fingers are my hands, my hands are my body, my body embraces you. It holds you. It holds you taught. In line. In control. Controlled. And I work upon you. Twisting and turning. Faster and faster. Faster and faster. Back and forth. Forth and back. Again. Faster and faster. Back and forth. Up and down. Down and up. Front and back. Back and front. Faster and stop. Stop and slowly. Slowly I release you. Let me let you go. I can touch you. I let go. Let my fingers touch your edge. Let them hold you. I will hold you. I will hold you softly. Quietly. I will turn you around and let you go softly. Let me touch you with my words. My words can touch you. My words are my body. Let my words work upon you.

Let my words work upon you. Let them touch the tip of your mind. Let them work into your body. I extend myself into your body. My fingers control my words that work their way into your body. Let them move within you.

Zoe Chan :: www.zoechanworks.com :: info@zoechanworks.com

You are cordially invited to tea time (Courtesy of The Suz), 2008

The merging of all three “Suz”, Sue, Su, and Sioux (representative of three alter-egos symptomatic of the polarizing impacts of race and identity politics) into a single entity is an attempt to re-define the self, using tactics familiar to how commercial and corporate industries re- brand themselves or form a new authentic identity. The Suz, in the guise of a faux real company and brand, fabricates familiar spaces or constructs to address the notions of authenticity, identity, and perceptions. You are cordially invited to tea time was the faux real collective’s first attempt to create the time for a participatory space and experience for the artist and viewer to interact and partake in an activity that lends itself to a critical dialogue of their immediate surroundings. The installation included an octagonal platform with custom made floor cushions, tea menus, and a tea set on a serving tray (all branded with The Suz logo) that was designed and constructed specifically to host a party of four for tea in the gallery. Throughout the course of the evening everyone was invited to tea time, as a hired employee (me disguised in a blonde wig) served tea to those who willingly decided to sit on top and participate.

**You can see a short video of the installation/performance captured live by wetheat project on the evening of the opening at this link: http://wetheat.tv/WHtvChannel2.html (go to the menu to the left and scroll down to Lee-Chun)**

Detail of ‘Childhood ‘memory station’ in Secret Museum of Mankind Installation

This piece was part of the installation Secret Museum Of Mankind where I created my own Natural History Museum, which included different ‘memory stations’: that represented my genetic past, childhood and future.

(Below) This mural is based off a original photograph obtained by my father during his service in the Bolivian Army in 1967. The characters in the piece are Che Guevara and his gang in the Bolivian jungles during their attempt to revolutionilize Bolivia. I used my father’s clothing and towels as materials.

Donna Huanca, Cuban Rebels, 1967 (Last Supper) 2007, 9’ x 12' Father’s Clothing on Canvas, Faux Cocaine

The Future Diorama was composed of all of the galleries pedestals and natural elements such as plants, dirt, bones, toilet paper.