Current ArtSway exhibitions:
Tina Gonsalves’ Somewhere In Between: studies in translocation, “a video exploration of seascapes and the engagement with the transient and evanescent nature of travel. These installations explore shifting realities, the nature of intimacy, and an engagement with time and distances.”
Julia Polonski’s Body: a sense of place, “an investigation of how a person experiences and occupies one’s own bodily space.”
“Polonski’s work is also fuelled by her interest in how we perceive a piece of cloth – such as a shroud – and the qualities that are found within it. She considers cloth as a document that can hold the narrative of a body; a document that can be read as a map of physical occupation, human experience, and personal history. To Polonski marked cloth appears able to bind individual and collective experience; the marks are for us to decipher, interpret or qualify. The changing nature of cloth retains stains and the strain of events. It scars as skin does, both exposing and protecting the body. Polonski is concerned that in its efforts to communicate, the body becomes one that hides as much as it reveals.”
Interesting, no? This reminds me of Bridget Booher’s Body Map of My Life, in You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. She provides a catalog of the location, cause, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up comments for all her physical and psychological scars – an exercise perhaps, as one critic puts it, made more interesting “for the associations the reader makes in trying to imagine his or her own history as a series of cartographic legends.”