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life drawing    life drawing    to-do-lists   acoustic locator (maquette)   marketplace    smell map, Jean-Talon Market   small mechanisims for drowning #2   small mechanisims map
current work

In contemporary culture, intersections between the body, science, technology and media are becoming rapidly intensified. And though this advancement offers a connectivity and global exchange never before seen, the form our interactions take is being significantly altered. Through my work I examine how isolation may be manufactured and intimacies redesigned as experiences become stripped of direct multi-sensorial richness.

Installation and performance-based works such as the Blood Collection Station, Acoustic Locator, hairshirt and marketPlace attempt to actively engage the senses in unfamiliar ways as a means for exploring how this terrain of fragmented, often virtual experience affects us phenomenologically. Their performative aspects utilize these investigations to open up opportunities for confronting notions of intimacy as participants engage in private visits, offer up blood and hair samples, or relinquish sensorial control to another.

The works on paper often consider how this manufactured estrangement may manifest. In the series, small mechanisms for drowning, psychological conditions of estrangement and anxiety are remapped onto various types of mechanical systems diagrams, such as the dialysis machine. Each technological step in the diagram is re-assigned with an emotional equivalent in a futile attempt to purify the psyche through the same external mechanical processes used to purify contaminated blood.

  — Nina Leo