NYU > Kimmel Center

These four young artists are working against the narcissistic autobiographical first person narratives, moving toward feminist inflected conceptual strategies. Their visions are both intimate and critical insights into identity – one that transcends the notion of autobiographical testimony. They are surpassing solipsism of autobiographical first person visual narratives, managing to focus on "recognition of identity codification, which is reinforced through endlessly altering significations." Starting from their own experience, they establish a critical relation to their surroundings and, ultimately to themselves. These strategies bring them back to the complex notion of contemporary dissolved self, which is still the crux of identity politics. The artists explain their projects in the first person:

Donna Clovis: I run away from the viewer in a red dress in the snow to hide my physical identity into an obscurity. The red acts as a juxtaposition. We identify the boldness of red color, but the identity of the person becomes more distant. Is our identity based upon the existence of what the viewer sees and interprets? Are we limited to identity only if we are alive or is identity forgotten because we do not see it anymore?

Mindy Katzman: An explosive landscape exists in the representation of self. Traversing a ground delineated by provocative boundaries, I disturb its dusty surface. Post 9/11, boundaries between surveillance and privacy have blurred under the pulsating hue of orange alerts. In this age of insecurity, a vague sense of "being watched" pervades the everyday. We are scrutinized: tracked by street video cameras, stopped at security checkpoints, monitored from the other side of our computers, recorded while on the phone. We are all suspect. We are all potential terrorists. We must submit proof of our identity. A photograph is taken. A bag is passed through a metal detector. Our anthem is: "See something, say something". These otherworldly images, mug shots taken to prove identity, contradict such scrutiny.

I-Hua Lee: I can never truly see myself. I look at myself in the mirror, and can not figure out if it is my body being captured by my gaze, or is my gaze capturing my body? The symbolic system reserved in society makes it problematic for me, as a woman, to be seen and see myself. The female subject is culturally vulnerable to the conventions of social behavior and dress code. In order to break the dominant forms of representing difference, I create objects of public gaze. I use satirical and cross-dressed costumes, backdrops, and performances to critique the male possessiveness over femininity, implying the presence of a masquerade that stands for social oppression and public opinions. In making the mask, a gap is being built which achieves a distance between the viewer and the images the viewer sees, and helps to produce identification.

Jess Levey: In my most recent projects In Defense of Food, and "Omnivore's Dilemma," (Titles of which has been appropriated from Michael's Pollen's brilliant books of the same name) the images of food projected are essential in the "reading" of the photographs. This work rests in the tension that exists between arousal and repulsion, between the grotesque and the erotic. Food, a universal need and an indulgence, represents impermanence and transformation while projected imagery of mass produced foods further exemplifies the role of artificiality within our culture and also within the photographic medium.

For further information, please contact: Kimmel.galleries@nyu.edu

Windows Gallery

In the First Person: Identity in Focus