Dissociation, Self and Objects – Ringling Underground
Thursday, November 2, 2017 (8-11PM)
Ringling Museum, Sarasota
Dissociation, Self and Objects reconstructs certain parts of the psychic structure to be singled out, explored and brought to their maximum development, often in objects. These repositioned objects produce an unbalanced state similar to that caused by a change of personality. Cultural change is hinted at here, brought about by artists Tom Winchester, Samantha Burns, Erin McCollough, Victoria Mayol, Jamie Moriarty and Jordan Holm who display their personal experiences in order to bring socially useful archetypal ideas or innovations into consciousness.
Ringling Underground
Tom WinchesterTom Winchester attempts to deconstruct the genre of portraiture through his Daylight series. As a genre ostensibly meant to convey not only the identity of the depicted individual, but also something genuine about his or her personality, this series taps into how daylight serves as a basis upon which we interpret the world around us. In this series, each individual appears in front of a white background in natural light. The depicted individuals are artists, musicians, and yogis from Saint Petersburg and Sarasota, Florida. By utilizing lighting that doesn’t signal a sense of artificiality, and by eliminating any outside context, Daylight focuses on how these individuals’ true personalities can be conveyed.
Samantha BurnsSamantha Burns assembles her interdisciplinary works around fragmented memories, objects, and experiences. Burns obtains a surreal yet familiar quality in her small paper works composed of abstract prints and precision cuts, utilizing printmaking and paper sculpting techniques. Her images contain symbolic references to fragmented memories in the form of objects. The interaction between mental and physical objects creates a dynamic tension within her installations. Crippled and disproportionate forms are imbued with complex negotiations of memory and response. Burn’s installation works delve into the value of material possessions as a way of defining, constructing, and maintaining one’s self-concept.
Erin McCulloughBothered by the excess in the world, Erin McCullough expresses her scavenger art practice within stoic integrated forms. McCullough manipulates and revives found materials and scraps to illuminate the waste of contemporary consumer culture. The blunt honesty she finds in fragments of cement, steel scaffolding, and sawdust reflect the compartmentalized aspects of her own life. Her resourceful practice breathes new life into the city’s detritus and constructs a new, separate art-form from the tangible experience.
Victoria MayolVictoria Mayol expresses her transition from Buenos Aires to the United States developing her work around her new-found home.Through a constant fluxing state, Mayol experiences the physical space in which she inhabits, finding comfort and intrigue in the natural spaces she interacts with. Mayol integrates thread-work and mixed media into her large scale ink drawings, developing a surface design that exists the paper and creates a tangible experience.
Jamie MoriartyJamie Moriarty, a thesis student at New College of Florida, builds compelling and uncomfortable works which raise both awareness and concern of the impending dilemmas between humans and the thinking machines. By simulating a complex organism and condensing it down to key visuals such as silicone skin, painted acrylic eyes, hair, microprocessors, and various circuitry, she further integrates the two disciplines of art and technology in order to push the limits of the experience in contemporary art. Filtering her studio practice and final work through social media, Moriarty juxtaposes the social impacts and experiences of creating self, object, and dissociation.
While attending a residency in NYC last year Jordan Holm began developing notions of object and detachment which opened up a layer of her work forcing Holm to think constructively and conceptually. Bits of broken asphalt and construction materials found on the streets of NYC encourage Holm to integrate form and artifice into her studio practice. Function and disruption are key to Holm’s practice, and will heavily influence her fine art thesis this spring at Ringling College of Art and Design.
