Double-Flesh
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Double-Flesh from mburlew on Vimeo. |
Double-Flesh
Double-Flesh is an installation that transforms a virtual performance into a felt presence. The video begins with a figure in a full-body floral skin, motionless and projected life-size. Slowly, the figure begins to move and explore its body through touch and drumming against it with its hands. The sound of this action is felt in a vibrating platform in front of the screen. Eventually the figure begins peeling off the floral skin and the performer, myself, continues exploring the different rhythms of my unclothed flesh. I am interested in the physicality of our selves; how body is mind and how empathy allows multiple bodies to feel/know the same thing. As a 9 minute video loop for one-on-one viewing, Double Flesh demands patience from participants from beginning to end. Patience is important to all of my work, as it slows down time and allows space for new relationships to build. Double-Flesh also asks for consent; when an audience member steps up to the platform they come face-to-face with another body in an intimate situation. Once this consent is given, participants are able to feel the vibrations of my body in their own, learning a new dimension of the work. Recording this performance into video format is also very important to the mission of the work: to make something virtual feel real, therefore pulling into question how we determine what is “real”. The viewer here becomes the surrogate body for my virtual self, melding me with you in one physical vessel. If you can feel (know) me in your body, am I not a real (felt) presence? Do you not now also equate me with you? Another intent of this work is to wrestle with the historical portrayal of women in art. Beginning as just a floral object, I become human and a parallel body to that of the participant. I am not the sexy nude in an image; I am a person like you. I also feel that the prolific presence of floral patterns in female things are metaphors for suffocating domestic facades that bind female bodies to certain roles. Wrapped in a floral skin I am an object, but my physicality and curiosity strips this from me and my self vibrates through the space beyond me. |
EAt CAKE
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Eat Cake
On behalf of Canada’s 150th Anniversary, I was asked by the Enriched Bread Artists to create an artwork around the theme of cake. For the final project, each artist’s work would be projected onto the side of the old Enriched Bread Factory for public viewing. I created a video that explores the sensuality of cake in a way that pushes into sexuality and the grotesque. Much like a random scene of sex or violence in a horror film, I wanted this video to be provocative. The act of consuming (devouring, incorporating, integrating, assimilating) a cake is both a shared act and an act of celebration. I want to twist this act into something sensorially intense and abject as a method for being critical of what it means at its core: a celebration of human consumption. Human life is not neat and orderly, but is instead carnal, fleshy, mortal, and hungry. Though we see Canada’s 150 as a clear quantification of our country’s identity, it is also the marking of one hundred and fifty years of human struggle to imagine a country (body) and to form foundations that will allow the future progress of it (to thrive; drive the blood) - however troubled (on the graves of others). |
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The Garden Cinema House from mburlew on Vimeo. |
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First Dance Video Clip from mburlew on Vimeo. |
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For more video projects, please visit my Vimeo account HERE.