figtion test mail

Name: Patricia Ho

Type: Proposal for Exhibition in Mid to End July 09

Pitched: Post-Museum (Tien)

Title: Figtion; a Non-narrative Exposition of Everyday Life ..

Figtion exists cumulatively as the process-based undertaking of 5 note-worthy mixed-media artists grappling pre-dominantly with alternative re-interpretations of the issues/estheticism of mainstream media — its status (in this case), as a pre-determinant/advocate of pop culture is (within the context of exhibition) stripped of pre-mediated elements demarcating televised ‘realities’ via the critique of the image by the image first popularized in the 1990s by Pierre Bourdieu ¹ —

As such, the works of Ho and J. Lee occur/unfold not as activist-type iconography/resistances against increasingly ‘omnipresent’ televised realties constructed by the views of an elitist (so called professional) few upon an opium(ed) majority but act as subtle parodies interrogating media-‘tolerance’ of such projects — a media with economic imperatives often shielded by the smokescreen of democracy. Video projections and DVD records of Ho and J. Lee thus occur in real time/authentic spaces often forgotten/looked over in the heated/impatient human environment in which ‘No one experience has a chance to complete itself because something else is entered upon so speedily ²’. In the acts of stilling the videos where anti-climaxes bring about the truth of the invasive power of all television realities, the words ‘Be still and know that I am media (god)’ take upon urgent and threatening meaning.

Consecutively, the works of R. Lee and Chinoh attempt to bring the photographic medium to non-popularized conclusions where conventional issues of truth/falsity ³ in photography becomes upended by methodologically engaging yet alternative (to photo-shop/other technological treatments) processes retrospectively enhancing the subjective individuation of both their works.

Bibliography:

Books

Beausse, Pascal. “Information: Inquiries into the Real and the Self-media,” In

Contemporary Experiences: Art as Experience, edited by Daniele Riviere, 59-93.

Paris: Editions Dis Voir.

Dewey, John. Art as Experience: Having an Experience. New York: Capricorn Books,

G.P.Putnam’s Sons, 1958.

1 Pascal Beausse, “Information: Inquiries into the Real and the Self-media,” in Contemporary Experiences: Art as Experience, ed. Daniele Riviere (Paris: Editions Dis Voir), 59-93.

2 John Dewey, Art as Experience: Having an Experience (New York: Capricorn Books, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1958), 45.

3 According to Beausse (see footnote 1), the contemporary issue of the photographical-medium as a (modern/post-modern) compromiser of reality is as as the looking for supposed truths in photography since pre-photo-shop interventions have existed as early as the photographical works of Gustave Legray, subsequently establishing/developing the idea of subjective photo-taking — rather/as a more accurate reading, contemporaneous approach to photography progressively expands to eccentric/interdisciplinary manipulation where said process imbibed becomes intimately co-related/on par with artist intention, sometimes to the extent of over-shadowing/subsuming the strength of subject matter as in the cases of R. Lee’s Light Boxes and Chinoh’s .