Lynette Lombard is a daring and inventive painter whose work is emotionally and physically felt and charged. She was my teacher at Knox College and continues to inspire me in life and creative endeavors. http://lynettelombard.com
Archive for March, 2009
Monthly Archive
Recently I have shifted my focus from illness to wellness. I am interested in how images of wellness are constructed and propagated. Mythical, idealized, and surreal images in the media give a very narrow view of the possible faces of health. Research into the advertising of pharmaceuticals and health products led me to create a series of idealized Wellness Images, Wellness Videos, and IDYLIFY, a website as portal for critique.
Imagine if you could buy one of these at PartyMania! Inside are candies and vitamin packets, along with some free drug samples. It is hand crafted of the Health Section of The Washington Post, flour paste, and crepe paper. My physical involvement in the making of this object revealed important lessons on process. Much like with the pinhole camera, the direct reality of materials brings something pixels don’t. Direct physical engagement also implicates me as part and parcel of the thing. It is a labor of love. As such, I haven’t yet brought myself to orchestrate its destruction. Soon to come in video!
Update: Smashed! 3/18/10
In Fall 2008 I launched the website below using the internet as tactical media. It is a project that sets up an intimate transaction between strangers. It is a site-specific and event-specific art intervention that puts messages of hope and healing on toilets, hidden from view until someone lifts the seat to purge. The project aims to provide a enough of a rupture of the expectations in bulimic purging to introduce questions where there are usually imperatives, community where there is usually isolation, and hope where there is despair.
Sticker texts were submitted by members of an online recovery community. They include, “Don’t wait- Accept yourself now” and “What are your true passions?” The gifts of the project extend also beyond the experience for the person who discovers these messages on the toilets. The “Do it Ourselves” component empowers us to take action to help others and reinforce the powerful idea that recovery is possible. The website and text of the project hope to bring an often stigmatized issue to us in a compassionate light. This is where art has had a special role in my life and throughout history: art can offer an entry point into difficult, lonely territory and grant possibilities for positive transactions between people.
In September of 2007 I was walking on a sidewalk and was hit by a car and crushed against a building. I confronted time, trauma, and my body in videos about past and present issues. These include 13 Swallows, Of Two Minds, and Reclaiming Space. They focus on my experiences taking pills, dealing with an eating disorder, and with the accident itself. Above are stills from four of these videos.
My earlier graduate work, RIPRealty, foreshadows current work in the ways I use myself and humor in critiquing a social phenomenon. In that case, the phenomenon was the McMansionization of my neighborhood. I created myself as a Real Estate agent, made flyers and business cards, and began interviewing agents, builders, homeowners, and demolition crews. I would like to continue this work with relational aesthetics and the economic crisis in mind.
