Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum
A Short History: Starring Asme as Herself / animation / 1min:36sec / 2007
(click here to view full animation)
pamela phatsimo sunstrum invents an alter ego named Asme who embodies a notion that multiple, alternate or hybrid identities can emerge through journeying, travel and other processes of (dis)location. In collages, drawings, experimental animations and performance, the many iterations of Asme are on a hero’s quest through landscapes that are composites of real places, imagined places and places that only exist when Asme is in them. The origins of the Asme quest and landscapes are often a synthesis of cross-cultural myths and fantastical re-imaginings of the artist’s own transnational experiences . The work is an attempt to understand the persistence of residue– the traces of a place that can create indelible connections between bodies and landscapes as opposed to those traces that become lost, misplaced or buried.
A Short History: Starring Asme as Herself is the first part in an ongoing series of site-specific animated performance works and was performed and shot at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine. Other works in the animation series include To Get To You: featuring Asme as Herself (2008) performed at Lake Mississippi in Ontario Canada as well as forthcoming works to be performed at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT, and at Bag Factory Studios in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Hi Pamela,
It seems that your work centers on blurring boundaries that mold singular and stable notions of self/other, body/landscape, and human/animal.
The landscape in “A Short Story: Starring Asme as Herself” is difficult to pin down in terms of geographic location and the various figures of Asme cannot be situated in a specific historical moment through dress. I’m thinking about how your approach relates to that of Saya Woolfalk, who mobilizes the notion of “no place” and whose figures are similarly ambiguous. Saya explores issues of ethnography and utopia in a postcolonial framework.
The women and landscapes in your collages and drawings remind me of Gaugin. Are you also engaging with notions of colonial/postcolonial gendered subjectivity?
Thank you so much for sharing your work.
Jillian
Dear Pamela,
Thanks for posting this work. I love the ambiguity that goes with the liquid/vapor nature of your performance and video work. There, but not there. Place, but no place.
Yes, I see the parallel with Saya Woolfalk’s utopian world. Your appearance in the landscape is naturally ethereal, while she animates a dense construct.
I find your intensity beautifully transparent and like how you enter the soul of your surroundings.
Please tell us more about where you’re going with Asme.
Thank you for responding to my work Jillian. It is important for me that the landscapes, and even the Asmes remain ambiguous in terms of geographic, cultural or even historical specificity. I am interested in discovering images/ideas/actions that can transcend the chronological and physical restrictions as a way of approaching an understanding of identity/”the self” as being always shifting, never fixed to a specific place or space.
I don’t think this work specifically or outrightly engages coloniality/postcoloniality with regards to gender or subjectivity, but it does grapple with notions of power in that ultimately, I am interested in what can happen when we reject definitions of self that come from “outside” sources –social norms, cultural expectations, political identifications, gendered activity etc (which I guess could all be considered colonial outcomes of one sort or another). To name one’s own self.