Patricia Brace

Tied to an interdisciplinary investigation that combines dancing, drawing, and sewing with film and photographic documentation, the work focuses on the live and the round in an attempt to locate the interstice, “between the real and the imaginary … where the imagined and the actual may meet”[1].  The work establishes a slippery relationship with the viewer between offering too much and not nearly enough. The process of making the work is derivative of my interest in interpersonal relationships, basic psychoanalysis, and feminism.

The work is informed by, to the extent of paying homage to, artists such as Marina Ambramovic, Yvonne Rainer, Hannah Wilke, and Pipliotti Rist.

The banality of the everyday meets the spectacle of art through the performers lack of dancing and acting experience.  It is in these gaps amid the reality of life lived and the illusion of performance, where the friction and meaning of the work exist. Ideas of woman’s history, patterns of behavior, and concepts of failure weave throughout the body of the work creating moments of transference between memories and experiences into the objects and actions within the performance.

These moments of transference suggest a sense of failure of individual perception in comparison to a collective consciousness. What happens when a unanimous collective memory opposes an individual’s recollection of the same history? If it is in the fissures of difference between a collective perspective where the truth lies, is the individual perspective valid?

The work suggests that the dichotomy between only existing through the affirmation of other people and being innately alone places us in a double bind as people, potentially leaving us unable to trust ourselves, as well as others.  This double bind leads the individual to question whether their perceived reality is in fact a potential fantasy, or if their fantasy has become the truth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LKc...