FIXATION
man[und]lady is a collaboration between artists Fiona Skelton and Sam Hatfield. They use humour and the Absurd to deconstruct psychosocial paradigms. Their work is also informed by their study of neuropsychology.
This two-part video work uses provocative moving images and an insidiously earwormish voiceover to explore psychodynamic processes of fixation.
Neurological advances now suggest our minds operate in repetitive, predictive feedback loops, feed by both introceptive and exteroceptive energies. These play out in a dynamic and re-enforcing exchange between drives (the Id), its objects, and other selves.
Skelton is the protagonist in the first sub-work, Exteroceptive, depicting an insatiable “self-talk” that narrates a stream of explicitly experienced wants external to herself. Frenetic, serial and constantly shifting, as the Ego suppresses the Id’s fixation on one object another immediately arises to take its place.
In the second sub-work, Interoceptive, these loops are transposed to the “other self” as embodied by Hatfield. Having previously experienced himself as a mere object in Exteroceptive, these patterns now become unsettlingly mirrored in his own mind. Dark, unacknowledged and unstructured, the Ego is not even aware that these simulacra have arisen, and thus they play out with a subconscious, dreamlike quality.
Exhibition Details:
Opening Friday July 20th 6-9pm
Exhibition runs July 18th – Aug 4th
Arcade Project Space (windows)
suite 2, level 1 / 119 Hopkins st Footscray
open Wed-Sat 12-5pm