WINDOW DRESSING
sophia bartholomew
+15 Window Exhibition
May 28 to July 27, 2013
CLOSED FOR INSTALLATION, I thought you’d said: the way you papered over the windows like that. But then, you said a lot of things, didn’t you? When I think back on it, none of it makes much sense. And you know what? I can see right through you, now … in places. I thought it was you, standing there, staring back at me. But I could be wrong. It could have been somebody else. Now I’m writing you this message: tracing letters in the breath I left on the windowpane.
Essay
WINDOW DRESSING might be a masquerade – clothing TNG’s +15 window with the texts the artist clothed herself in for three hundred and eighty two consecutive days. The project make yourself a version had been structured around the “making” and wearing of a different text-based t-shirt every day, and now WINDOW DRESSING poses as a translation in a small, glass structure in a far away city.
“To masquerade is to manufacture a lack in the form of a certain distance between oneself and one’s image,” Mary Ann said, thirty years ago. [1] “There is no subject, just an opening to the world,” furthered Giorgio, paraphrasing Martin, and going on to discuss Michel: “in the last years, he focused more on the process of subjectivation through practices of self: self liberation and care of self … we have no subject as a founding and pre-existing substance, but always just a process.” [2] They left us a sign, a sign for us. [3]
Notes
[1] Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator” (1982)
[2] Giorgio Agamben, The Problem of Subjectivity (lecture) (2009) http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/videos/the-problem-of-subjectivity/
[3] John Kelsey, “The Galleries,” Rich Texts (2010)
sophia bartholomew is a bourgeois parasite who wants to live in her own head all of the time. from the side of a mountain, mostly, and undergraduate-d from UBC’s visual arts program in Vancouver, bartholomew now finds herself on the opposite coast. she is associate director at gallery connexion, an artist run centre in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and co-director/curator of the resolute parka, an experimental exhibition space currently located in Banff, Alberta. recent projects include installations at Topdown Bottomup in Vancouver, and ROOM 321 in Banff, with upcoming projects for Roadside Attractions and Window Box Gallery in Toronto.