Time Waste Management presents the slip of the tongue unveils the cuts from your teeth
Seemingly insignificant instances and what they might actually reveal...
The language that we learn to think of ourselves in…
Shaping perspective and maybe the ineffable, by creating visual interpretations in the forms of video, performance, installation and sculpture.
adam farcus mikayla brown david matteson paul finch jahfre colbert vanessa barros andrade
Identity plays an ostensibly important role in our society. Your physical body, language, culture, and class seem to shape your existence. What is its relevance? What happens when you revisit, isolate and apply theory to the things that have shaped these influences? I’m interested in autodidactic education and applying learned ideologies to curating and my own practice. For this show I chose to focus on psychoanalytic concepts. I recently started a series of self reflecting activities, in search of things that have shaped my own identity. One of these activities included watching cartoons, that I spent time with during my childhood, and screencapping scenes that left an impression. This practice lead me to study certain concepts from lacanian theory such as the Mirror Phase. I thought about the mirror stage being applied to not only infancy but also childhood, adolescence and early adulthood.
The mirror stage describes the developmental stage of awareness of the body outside of thought. Before this stage the self is seen as fragmented. The conception of the “whole” inner self (or what Freud would call ego) begins with a “mirror” and your response to your own gaze. Humans are one of the only animals that can respond to this “mirror” acknowledging that one exists in the world as “this” (you). This “mirroring” could also happen through another human being (a mother, caretaker or other). As an infant you are in a symbiotic relationship with your caretaker to the point in which you’re almost merged. Self conception happens in the other’s absence. This absence causes a discomfort which forces you to fill the space with a symbol (ie thumbsucking).
Lacan also believed that the inner self is structured like a language. I feel inner thoughts are constructed by a specific kind of private language. Any thought that is ineffable or escapes language seem to not exist in reality as .. Language itself is an anonymous force (that is handed to us) created of symbols that constitute and paraphrase thought. Lacan saw the unconscious as syntax. The concept of the slip of the tongue (in psychoanalytical terms) refers to the idea of a repressed impulse. The impulse or “slips” are thought to surface when you accidently say a word in place of another during verbal communication. For example: “I’m going to take my pet for a talk” replacing the word walk with talk could symbolize some repressed memory about being alone and creating/talking to an imaginary friend.
The artists in this exhibition have created conceptual works reflecting and contextualizing these ideologies, some intentional and others unintentional.
An important and famous exponent of psychoanalytic theory as applied to artists and their works is Carl Jung’s ideas about the collective unconscious. The archetypal imagery in particular were popular especially among the American Abstract expressionists in the 1940s and 1950s.The surrealist concept of drawing imagery from dreams, and the unconscious, stream of consciousness in writing and painting defined the practice of many 20th century artists.
