Exhibition at CUBE37 Glass Studio

Frankston Arts Centre, Victoria
13/09 2006 - 15/10/2006

Swipe is currently being presented at the Frankston Art Centre until 15/10/2006.

This work is part of the overall swipe project.

Exile

AN EXILE WHO ASKS "WHERE?"

15. The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing. Situationist in a sense, and not without laughter --since laughing is a way of placing or displacing abjection. Necessarily dichotomous, somewhat Manichaean, he divides, excludes, and without, properly speaking, wishing to know his abjections is not at all unaware of them. Often, moreover, he includes himself among them, thus casting within himself the scalpel that carries out his separations.


16. Instead of sounding himself as to his "being," he does so concerning his place: "Where am I?" instead of "Who am I?" For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic. A deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines - for they are constituted of a non-object, the abject - constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh. A tireless builder, the deject is in short a stray. He is on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding. He has a sense of the danger, of the loss that the pseudo-object attracting him represents for him, but he cannot help taking the risk at the very moment he sets himself apart. And the more he strays, the more he is saved.

Julie Kristeva Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982)

Access

'BEEP BEEP'

The scanner recognised her card and gave her access to the building.

She felt relieved as her card didn't work last week and would not let her in.

As her contract had been renewed, she went to the security desk to explain the whole story, but for some reason the security guard didn't believe her.

Feeling annoyed, she asked to call her supervisor to come and let her in.

'Well - I suppose so' the guard replied, looking at her suspiciously.

'This is silly' she complained, 'You say hello to me every morning!'

Boat 2001

It had been a strange and frightning couple of months.

Firstly, the twin towers burned live on TV like a strange Hollywood disaster movie. But this was for real.

All of a sudden the world around her had changed, becoming paranoid and defensive.

When she watched the news and learnt that over 400 people were left to drown, she felt cold.

Didn't people's lives matter any more, why were some human beings less important than others?

Border

The old man told her about when he needed a special passport to get into the testing area.

Apparently there were a range of experiments being done on the site.

'Did you ever see a mushroom cloud?' she asked.

'Oh yes', the man replied, with a dreamy, faraway look in his eye. 'They are an amazing sight to behold, truly amazing'.

Airport

She kept staring out the glass windows at the tarmac, hoping the time would pass more quickly.

Over two hours had elapsed since she arrived at the airport, and there was still around five hours to go until he connecting flight.

She felt very alone, and wished she was already on her way home. The weeks in the foriegn country had exhausted her - too many things lost in translation - too many times having no one to share her adventures.

Even though she had not yet departed, waiting at the airport made her feel like she had already left this place and was one step closer to home.

Introduction

Swipezone explores how alienation affects perceptions of identity. The work aims to present a range of issues that are related to notions of loss of identity and displacement. By investigating the implications of diaspora and the breaking down of safe, describable forms of identification as a process that creates alienation, this work attempts to present the spaces in-between. There are many cases where the condition of social displacement may occur in terms of social relations. For instance, a change of residence and community can trigger feelings of isolation and lack of security in a previously affirmed sense of self.

This blog is a documentation of the project at www.swipe.name