A Subject Self-Defined
About
“A Subject Self-Defined” (2016) evolved from my Selfie Drawing Project (2015-2017) and premiered as a solo exhibition at TRANSFER Gallery in 2016 of large-format looped moving images and an augmented reality book (produced in collaboration with UNBOX and Blippar), that took its title from Joseph Kosuth’s 1966 neon sculpture that spells out and is eponymously titled “A Subject Self-Defined.” He belonged to a group of artists involved in stripping down the art object, reducing it to ideas and information that were detached from personal meaning. Forty-nine years later, when we find art in the age of networked identity and digital dematerialization, I am perplexed by subjecthood and self-definition in relationship to the “personal” when performed publicly.” TRANSFER Gallery statement: ‘A Subject Self-Defined’ is a body of work from Carla Gannis that addresses issues of branded identity; age and body estimation; catastrophe culture; and online agency via static, dynamic and interactive “selfie” imagery. The woman’s face has served as the muse of the male gaze throughout art history. Artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Frida Kahlo, and Cindy Sherman have subverted this idea of woman as figure, as a mere face, and as muse through self-portraiture. They called into question what happens when a woman turns the paintbrush and, in our contemporary times, the camera, to her own face. In ‘A Subject Self-Defined’, Carla Gannis provides the viewer with multiple vantage points that traverse various forms of self-portraiture and mixed-media methodologies. Her series converges a wide array of technologies – drawing, painting, animation, social media, and augmented reality – together to serve as the artist herself re-represents herself. Courtesy of TRANSFER DATA TRUST | www.transfergallery.com/data-trust Studio Acknowledgments: Video Editing Assistance: Ray Tee and Clyde Cabanban Sound Design by Christopher Rutledge and Christopher Knollmeyer
