Video; performance; 3D animation; sound. 2022.
Featured in “Proximity, Pleasure, Plasticity: Looking at Performance”, Dazibao, Montreal, Canada – April 21st to June 23rd, 2022.
Identity templates for a disordered body. Selected Frame.
Overlapping a handful of mediums, and referencing the performative and visual grammar of YouTube and social media, the piece aims to convey a pastiche of self-representation and institutional critique. At the same time, it exacerbates speculative contexts in which a body augments itself through technology.
A 3D model constructed out of pictures through the scanning technique of photogrammetry becomes the central point around which all other images arrange. This digital object, initially conceived as a performative expansion of the physical body, is reiterated through a camera performance that presents a fictitious transit prior to the body scanning. Renders of the 3D model in different phases of the editing process as well as a documentation of its passage of objectification through 3D printing supplement the visual narrative.
This media multiplication purposefully overlaps the technicality of making an object from a body with the cultural implications of otherness. As a performative exploration of image-making and its technical interfaces, the piece revolves around the tensions between the diversity mandates of art institutions —that see in cultural minorities a way of staying current— and the personal conflicts of avoiding tokenization.
Curatorial text by Emma-Kate Guimond and France Choinière:
Through a roster of augmented and technological interfaces for body imaging, Identity templates for a disordered body addresses identity through rehearsals of self-seeing. Opening with a staged interview of a drag-like persona, meticulously decorated with an array of viral fad references, the work then segues into the production of a plastic 3D print made from scanning the artist’s body. Literally objectified and rendered into data, the artist uses the 3D modeling software as a kind of endoscope to look around inside this fleshless version of himself. Such multiplicity of forms are a means by which González-Rosas iterates otherness and the semiotic economy in which it plays out as thresholds of consumption, satiation, and resistance.
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