Search

ARCHIVES
CONTACT US
WORLD NEWS

Group exhibit explores the body's relationship to physical landscapes

"Allocated Domains" joins three University of Arizona female artists in a show that explores themes about the female body through photography, sculpture, video and computer art.

Geneva Foster's installations feature two eight-foot-high dresses with doors cut out of the skirt area and a window to look inside the skirt. Each dress houses one chair with a TV screen imbedded in the back of it. The screens show a running video of a Flam-Chen fire performance in which the dresses are worn and pushed around on wheels.

"The dresses are actually chairs," Foster, a UA fine arts student, said. "Me and the other woman who are wearing the skirts in the video footage are sitting in chairs inside them. The skirt is a chair and there is a chair inside it.

"It's like mobile furniture. It holds your weight, it allows you to rest, you are held in space, but you're pinned inside."

"I think the element of video is really interesting, and I like the way that all of these aspects connect - that process of saying it exists at this level as an object, at a different level as performance, and at another level as documentation or video art. All of these things come together."

Foster said she has also been very active with performance art during her time in Tucson, working with groups such as Thentingari and Flam-Chen. She says she's motivated by spatial atmospheres that alter people's sense of reality, whether in real-time video or performance.

"What I like about performance art is that it's so real and physical," she said. "You can look into a photograph and see a mysterious image and wonder what that space is and be confused and feel like something magical happened."

Foster said her work blends different art forms, causing a new time-frame for audiences.

"My goal is to create that same kind of mysterious atmosphere but it is actually happening in physical space," she said. "The interesting thing about video documentation is that it is done in real time, it has that sense of video used as a means to document legitimate happenings."

The rugged and textural medium provides the exhibit with a sense of history that relates to human life.

"I'm definitely looking for that meeting space between making objects that are sculptural and having them relate to performance and to the human body," Foster said. "My original fascination with furniture was that I was making stuff that when you sat in it you felt a certain way. The way that it held your body was really sexual, or rigid, and I was interested in how that effected how you felt."

The works are about process and Foster hopes that people will react to the work based on their own experiences.

"A lot of art is really self-indulgent, dealing with really confessional and traumatic things that the artist has gone through, and I'm really uncomfortable with that," Foster said. "I really respect art work that can convey a political notion or that can convey something beyond just personal experience."

Brica Wilcox, a UA graduate, brings her color photographs to the show - uniting the human body with various landscapes. Photographs of figures are joined with images of landscapes and machines.

Her unconventional technique blurs and abstracts the subjects so the body becomes an abstract landscape while natural landscapes become figural.

Jana Minka's Ink Jet Prints work similarly by juxtaposing technical plans, maps and photographs of landscapes with images of the female body.

Minka's images are in stark contrast with Wilcox's because of their the crisp clarity. However, both artists use landscapes as metaphors for mapping the body, suggesting both spiritual and emotional responses.

The exhibition takes place in the Lionel Rombach Gallery through March 30.