Second Selves
by Celina Colby
Walking down the street, three people scroll through their Facebook feeds. One of them is stalking her ex’s new girlfriend, and another is uploading a picture of the party he went to last night. On the train two friends tweet at each other from seats across the aisle and a teenage girl cries while reading a breakup text. Our technology has gone beyond being useful to being a part of us—a curated reflection of who we are. In the exhibit Second Selves at the Distillery Gallery, curator Alexis Anais Avedisian brings together six artists who are trying to reconcile their public and private selves.
The first thing that greets the viewer in the clean, white space is a bed. This is Avedisian’s own piece. The mattress is covered with white sheets and a lace blanket. It’s rumpled in an intimate way as though the owner just rolled out. On the bed there’s an iPhone. Avedisian encourages visitors to lie down on the bed and scroll through the phone. On it is a lengthy prose poem of texts Avedisian sends to herself. The texts serve as a kind of diary of her emotional state. They are dramatically personal, relating to her relationship with a former lover and her relationship to herself. “It’s almost impossible to discuss intimacy without also referencing the role consumer technology has in orchestrating it,” says Avedisian. “My own former devices, while rarely activated, serve me as cherished diaries.” By lying in the bed and reading someone’s text messages, the viewer is trespassing on one of the most private moments of contemporary life.
If in Avedisian’s piece you are an outsider viewing someone’s private self, Leah Schrager is the opposite—you are looking inward. The show includes five photographs from her Photo Booth series. They are large-scale images of her that she has painted over to various degrees with glittery, silver paint. Schrager describes the photo booth experience as both alienating and uniting, “To me they feel both lonely (since I was feeling lonely when I took them) and part of a community, since I felt I was connecting to other girls who do Photo Booth selfies.” The glitter, which shrouds Schrager’s face and turns her into an every-girl, could also be seen as the gloss that we put on our public selves. We paint ourselves in a very specific way, to the extent that the original girl underneath is indistinguishable. Each of the photographs in the progression becomes slightly less distorted, but they are never clear enough to fully see the person underneath.
It’s impossible to go further in the exhibit without first seeing Phil Fryer’s video installation called “Mercy.” Projected from the floor against the wall, the film shows Fryer’s hands raised up in the air from forearm to fingers. They present the suggestion of both surrender and openness, and they seem weightless and light in the air. During the opening, Fryer was engaged in the other side of the performance. He held the projector up with his hands until he physically couldn’t any longer. Here we see a paradox between the weightless hands that are projected, and the living hands that are strained under the weight of the projection. Fryer is confronting his projected version of himself. He says of the performance, “This act of exhausting a portion of the body is a direct reference to the struggle of living with chronic illness. The live self is forced to show a limitation in this action, while the projected self does not.”
Tucked into a corner is Blake Hiltunen’s sculpture. It’s the bust of a man, a traditional funerary piece, but it’s been slightly eroded with cracks down the front that resemble tears falling over the man’s face. The bust is mounted on a cart, a slightly more industrial version of what a trendy, entertaining household might use for a bar cart. Hiltunen is fascinated with the idea of funerary monuments. “As if a name carved in stone will last to the end of time. Or that rendering one’s likeness allows life to escape from time’s curse. These stones speak to the weight of death: the fear of the unknown, the unrelenting force of gravity, the desire to stand up right forever and the inevitable crush back into the earth.” The monument he shows us is already on its way back to earth. The erosion will continue from cracks to fractures and then to complete dissolution. This carefully constructed portrait won’t last forever, and neither will we.
Across from Hiltunen’s existential crisis is a mechanized tree. Well, not a tree exactly, a tumbleweed. Sam Metcalf found the tumbleweed in eastern Wyoming and took it with him. “I decided to give the tumbleweed a means of continuing its motion,” he says. He attached it to a mechanized arm that turns it as though it were still tumbling. Wind data funneled via the Internet into the machine from the spot in Wyoming where he found the tumbleweed ensures that the machine will simulate the wind conditions of the tumbleweed’s home. Here we see a technological reflection of nature. Metcalf has taken something and recreated it with technology to be a similar, but never the same version of the original tumbleweed. This is exactly what happens daily when people recreate themselves via their technology. The reflection is never exactly the same, even if all the data come from the original source.
The final piece in the show is a video installation by Julie Nymann. Displayed in a small room off the main installation space, the film demands full attention. Two identical images of a female are facing each other. They begin to move slowly towards each other while simulating passionate kissing. The figures continue to kiss the air, slowly and intimately, while moving towards the center of the frame. For a moment it seems like they’ll meet in the middle to fulfill the stereotypical straight man’s fantasy, but suddenly one of them stops and opens her eyes. Now she’s confronted by the image of herself, kissing and licking the air in front of her. She sees the image that the rest of the world does, the public self that she has created. The figure moves back, repulsed. Nymann asks the integral question, if we could see our curated public images from the outside, would we like what we see?
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Image Credit: Image by Matthew Gamber.
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Celina Colby is the editorial assistant at Art New England magazine and the blogger behind Trends and Tolstoy.