Elizabeth MacKenzie

Seymour Art Gallery: Sept 14 - Oct 22, 2016

This exhibition presented a new series of large-scale, drawing-based digital prints investigating the problematics of self-portraiture, along with an installation that annotated my creative process within the development of this work.

I work with materials and processes that interrupt representation and create tension between a physical gesture and the illusion it creates. Rather than pursuing the idea of a portrait as a fixed, singular image I represent the face as an ambiguous, shifting field of interaction and interpretation. These transformations suggest lived experience, as well as the externalization of psychic projections. The images represent me and not-me—a process of becoming and unbecoming.

The prints were presented along the back wall of the gallery, visible before entering the space. After entering the gallery and turning away from the prints two installations became visible on the back of the two entry walls. These represented the motive and method behind the work. On one side, a collection of sketches, experiments, and fragments from past projects representing a “genealogy” of the new work. On the other side, a large mind map, rendered directly on the wall, reflected my ruminations on this project.

This series of drawings responds to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein. The creature at the heart of this story is an object of both fascination and revulsion. Like all monsters, he exists outside of normative standards and in doing so represents our most fearful selves.

One of the many themes within the novel is the creator’s struggle to accept what (s)he has created. In her book Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters cultural theorist Judith Halberstram describes the story as “an allegory about a production that refuses to submit to its author.” The creature’s evasiveness is, in part, what engages my interest within this project.

The Gaze of History was shown at the Burnaby Art Gallery from July 6-Aug 26, 2012. This exhibition presented a selection of portraits from the gallery collection along with an extensive series of faces that I drew directly on the gallery walls.

The people who pass through buildings always mark them in some way. The powdered graphite faces I drew represented real and imagined former residents of this building. The drawings were intentionally faint and indistinct; they blended with the building’s architecture while interacting with the artworks around them.

The prints and drawings from the collection included in The Gaze of History considered the gaze and directed looking. Seen in dialogue with each other and my wall drawings, they provided an opportunity to consider the boundaries of history, subjectivity and representation.