#CANCELLED
Giannina Dwin
Carla Forte
Sanam Erfani
Sebastian Koseda
Carlene Muñoz
Mark Osterman
Stephanie Patsula
David Prusko
Denis Rovinskiy
Curatorial Gestures, Beláxis Buil
Giannina Dwin
Carla Forte
Sanam Erfani
Sebastian Koseda
Carlene Muñoz
Mark Osterman
Stephanie Patsula
David Prusko
Denis Rovinskiy
Curatorial Gestures, Beláxis Buil
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan reinterpreted Freud’s work to develop a new psychoanalytical theory of humankind. Lacan’s work eventually spawned further new ideologies and approaches to psychoanalysis.1 One of Lacan’s most well-known arguments categorizes the order of reality in three parts: the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real.2 In this curatorial statement, I compare and contrast the works artists have completed during the pandemic that may, unconsciously or consciously, capture Lacan’s triad. Because the pandemic forced communities, cities, states, and nations into isolation, individuals had to grapple with the cancellation of daily life. On a broader scale, it was our uncertainty around not knowing what life would be like and our lack of prior knowledge about the virus that perpetuated a heightened sense of anxiety. When forced into isolation, we had no choice but to face an unstable social landscape on our own. Our understanding of self as a whole in the external world was reduced to an internalized image of self in confined spaces.3 During this isolation, the self had to mediate between the external and internal world. Therefore, the quarantine space became a residence where the ego, the external world, and the internal world reformulated their existence. Although much of the news surrounding the pandemic caused a sort of mass hysteria in the general public, other forms of psychological negotiation articulating psychic order and/or function with the self and the self’s relationship to others began to surface. We were able to slow down and ‘make sense that the real is everything that is not the media’.4 Additionally, being confined in a solitary space where the self was allowed time and distance to reformulate its existence on a broader scale in relationship to the rest of society meant that there were time and space for the self to rid itself of any objectifiable identifications imposed by social expectations from the external world.5 Hence, the self could begin to mirror a transformative identity in the ‘new normal’ social climate rather than the hyper-anxious personality many of us have come to accept as normal.
We have been living in a world of hyper-reality, participants in a hyper-saturated, fast-paced play who have lost connections to the self and to ourselves. Perhaps the busyness of life has kept us detached from real human experiences and far removed from questioning what our ‘daily sense of the world is’. 6 The media does a phenomenal job of reminding the general public what ‘real’ is. The real, as Lacan explains, has no definition in any language. In other words, the real is something we know, but can’t really explain.7 In an already-frenzied world, individuals know that a society could be organized to slow down and be present. It’s possible, but the media focuses on mirroring the frenzied, chaotic existence we already experience. In Sebastian Koseda’s painting, The Black Friday Paintings, the viewer experiences 'social and aesthetic dimensions of hyper culture’; a scene all-too-familiar. During moments of crisis, spectators witness one another hoarding material goods, food, and basic needs at stores and at times turn violent. People become savages or, as Koseda points out, ‘ hungry for high-quality media consumption, battling over devices that propagate their own value to the point of violence’. As is the case in the video piece Epedemic, Pandemic, Endemic, Sindemic, multi-disciplinary artist David Prusko comments on the lack of public health strategies to quell the current pandemic crisis. The video’s intense and rapidly-changing colors evoke the sounds of sirens and flashing ambulances screeching through vacant city streets. The tension further swells as the public is bombarded every so often by the increasing number of deaths due to COVID-19. Koseda and Prusko point to symbols, or what Lacan addresses as the symbolic order, by attaching our anxiety to a symbol we consider real. When there is public hysteria, or chaos, we gain some psychological control over an outcome there is control over. Simply put, the unknown becomes real by grabbing on to what we do know. In these artists’ works, the viewer comes to understand how individuals grab the tangible (material goods, medicine, vaccines) to serve as a ‘link or reference to stand for something else’ that we cannot explain through language.8 The public’s fear at this moment is about coming to terms with America’s lack of leadership and defunding of urgent research needed to quash the virus. The real, or what we know without having language to describe it, is that the public (who believes the virus is real and deadly) speculates that the government administration doesn’t care if people lose their lives. For many of us, the answer to silencing the chaos is to turn inwards and rebuild order within our spaces and reclaim our psychic equilibrium. Such an example is noted in the works of mixed-media artist Carlene Muñoz.
However, at times it is by experiencing violent imagery that it becomes most evident that the self needs be removed from such tumultuous experiences, truths, environments, or slippery realities that disrupt our psyche and ability to cultivate a healthy relationship to the self and others. Removing the self from ‘what we are trying to describe 'is, at times, the immediate solution to ground the self in unstable liminal spaces or realities, in order to psychically survive ‘the limited things the brain can do’ while the individual is experiencing the real (reality).9 Performance artist Stephanie Patsula’s Call of the Void is a body of work specifically created during the pandemic. Patsula investigates her body and her space by mediating herself between a state of here and there. She ‘questions liveness and the symbiotic relationship to the viewer or live audience’.10 Call of the Void finds Patsula integrating her body into public spaces and allows the viewer, if any, to navigate her work while practicing social distancing. An interesting point is how the artist anchors her body in the public settings by using a mirror. She grapples with the reality of isolation, solitude, and the significance of symbiotic relationships to others and utilizes the gesture of gazing at her own reflection in the mirror, as if entranced in a state of deep meditation that reveals her deeper understanding to connect with the self. Patsula reflects a world she understands, is trying to understand, or sees with those around her. What could be considered a fantastical or heightened spiritual state by many, or an imagined state unattainable by the public, is indeed accomplished by Patsula during her public intervention. Because the pandemic crisis has caused society to cancel its normal routines, opportunities to pause and connect to the self become readily available to those aware of being given such a precious time to do so. Isolation has probably made many people uncomfortable, as the ‘normal’ busy life drowns out questions about who we are as social animals. The anxiety of life keeps those questions at the back of our minds. While society is on pause, those questions can be examined. It’s in the state of the imagination or the imaginary, as Lacan called it, where one can disconnect from the ‘normal’ and question how we as a society could arrive at a consciously controlled, elevated sense of self with ourselves and with others, that could eventually lead to symbiotic societies.
'Who and what one “imagines” other persons to be, what one thereby “imagines” they mean when communicatively interacting, who and what one “imagines” oneself to be, including from the imagined perspectives of others’.11 This thought or theory could be applied to our relationship with the self and the imagined state of living in a greater, symbiotic society. Our minds immediately evoke thoughts of Utopia. In essence, the practicality of living in Utopia is heavily burdened by the reality of what one witnesses in the media: savage, barbaric, brutal inhumane behaviors. A practical approach to manifesting large-scale change begins with acknowledging that the liminal spaces we dwell in need to be stabilized by changing our own perspectives of ourselves and others. Simple changes in our self’s daily lives need to be made, such as removing the self from violent environments even while presently experiencing and living the reality, whilst peaceful protests demand social changes such as reform, justice, communal engagement, nurturing other’s psyche, providing better job and educational opportunities, and cultivating meaningful, nonjudgmental alliances with all races and cultures. Then the lovely, poised, and curious gaze the viewer sees in Patsula’s work, a gaze making sense of herself and her environment, becomes a shared space with those living/experiencing the public space. Thus, the space that comes to terms with this becomes harmonious ground for the self/selves and nature to imagine an environment for society to thrive in.
Installation artist Giannina Dwin explores the meaning of environment, space, and landscape during the pandemic by creating a body of work that echoes nature’s soothing elements. Vamos a la Playa is a large-scale spatial installation consisting of salt. Dwin creates environments for viewers to experience and photographs the work. The images reflect scenes in nature often missed if the viewer is not present or tuned in to nature. In this instance, the environment appears to be the soft banks of a beach. It is another liminal space between here, there, now, or somewhere in our memory. The gentle movements of the ripples suggest the water’s ability to cleanse any surface it meets. It is as though the photograph is an invitation, a pleasant summons for the viewer to shift their gaze and presentness to a moment that evokes a sense of wellbeing. It is calming. The languid waves clear away what no longer serves the environment. It is a moment of peace. It is a moment of cleansing. It is by creating the supple ripples of salt that she delicately reminds the onlooker to gaze softly at a horizon we imagine possible; a momentary second of peace which cannot be described with language. Experiencing the liminal space between the real and the imaginary in Dwin’s work encourages the viewer to manifest a reality we are all aching to live.
- Beláxis Buil
Endnotes1. Lacan, Jacques, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-196-, The Seminar of Jaques Lacan,Routledge, NY, W.W. Norton & Company, NY, 1992
2. The Encyclopedia of Literacy and Cultural Theory: Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, WWW.OnlineLibrary.Wiley.com, Accessed May/June 2020
3. ibid.
4. The Chicago School of Media Theory, symbolic/real/imaginary, WWW.lucian.uchicago.edu, Accessed May/June 2020
5. ibid.
6. The university of Chicago: Theories of Media, symbolic, real, imaginary, WWW.csmt.uchicago.edu, Accessed May/June 2020
7. Lacan’s Orders: Fraud, Absence & Impossibility, Thought Cooperative, WWW.youtu.be/qypBF24g, Accessed May/June 2020
8. ibid.
9. ibid
10. Stephanie Patsula, Call of the Void, 2020, Artist Statement,
11. Jacques Lacan, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, WWW.plato.stanford.edu, Accessed May/June 2020
Edited by Global English Editing
We have been living in a world of hyper-reality, participants in a hyper-saturated, fast-paced play who have lost connections to the self and to ourselves. Perhaps the busyness of life has kept us detached from real human experiences and far removed from questioning what our ‘daily sense of the world is’. 6 The media does a phenomenal job of reminding the general public what ‘real’ is. The real, as Lacan explains, has no definition in any language. In other words, the real is something we know, but can’t really explain.7 In an already-frenzied world, individuals know that a society could be organized to slow down and be present. It’s possible, but the media focuses on mirroring the frenzied, chaotic existence we already experience. In Sebastian Koseda’s painting, The Black Friday Paintings, the viewer experiences 'social and aesthetic dimensions of hyper culture’; a scene all-too-familiar. During moments of crisis, spectators witness one another hoarding material goods, food, and basic needs at stores and at times turn violent. People become savages or, as Koseda points out, ‘ hungry for high-quality media consumption, battling over devices that propagate their own value to the point of violence’. As is the case in the video piece Epedemic, Pandemic, Endemic, Sindemic, multi-disciplinary artist David Prusko comments on the lack of public health strategies to quell the current pandemic crisis. The video’s intense and rapidly-changing colors evoke the sounds of sirens and flashing ambulances screeching through vacant city streets. The tension further swells as the public is bombarded every so often by the increasing number of deaths due to COVID-19. Koseda and Prusko point to symbols, or what Lacan addresses as the symbolic order, by attaching our anxiety to a symbol we consider real. When there is public hysteria, or chaos, we gain some psychological control over an outcome there is control over. Simply put, the unknown becomes real by grabbing on to what we do know. In these artists’ works, the viewer comes to understand how individuals grab the tangible (material goods, medicine, vaccines) to serve as a ‘link or reference to stand for something else’ that we cannot explain through language.8 The public’s fear at this moment is about coming to terms with America’s lack of leadership and defunding of urgent research needed to quash the virus. The real, or what we know without having language to describe it, is that the public (who believes the virus is real and deadly) speculates that the government administration doesn’t care if people lose their lives. For many of us, the answer to silencing the chaos is to turn inwards and rebuild order within our spaces and reclaim our psychic equilibrium. Such an example is noted in the works of mixed-media artist Carlene Muñoz.
However, at times it is by experiencing violent imagery that it becomes most evident that the self needs be removed from such tumultuous experiences, truths, environments, or slippery realities that disrupt our psyche and ability to cultivate a healthy relationship to the self and others. Removing the self from ‘what we are trying to describe 'is, at times, the immediate solution to ground the self in unstable liminal spaces or realities, in order to psychically survive ‘the limited things the brain can do’ while the individual is experiencing the real (reality).9 Performance artist Stephanie Patsula’s Call of the Void is a body of work specifically created during the pandemic. Patsula investigates her body and her space by mediating herself between a state of here and there. She ‘questions liveness and the symbiotic relationship to the viewer or live audience’.10 Call of the Void finds Patsula integrating her body into public spaces and allows the viewer, if any, to navigate her work while practicing social distancing. An interesting point is how the artist anchors her body in the public settings by using a mirror. She grapples with the reality of isolation, solitude, and the significance of symbiotic relationships to others and utilizes the gesture of gazing at her own reflection in the mirror, as if entranced in a state of deep meditation that reveals her deeper understanding to connect with the self. Patsula reflects a world she understands, is trying to understand, or sees with those around her. What could be considered a fantastical or heightened spiritual state by many, or an imagined state unattainable by the public, is indeed accomplished by Patsula during her public intervention. Because the pandemic crisis has caused society to cancel its normal routines, opportunities to pause and connect to the self become readily available to those aware of being given such a precious time to do so. Isolation has probably made many people uncomfortable, as the ‘normal’ busy life drowns out questions about who we are as social animals. The anxiety of life keeps those questions at the back of our minds. While society is on pause, those questions can be examined. It’s in the state of the imagination or the imaginary, as Lacan called it, where one can disconnect from the ‘normal’ and question how we as a society could arrive at a consciously controlled, elevated sense of self with ourselves and with others, that could eventually lead to symbiotic societies.
'Who and what one “imagines” other persons to be, what one thereby “imagines” they mean when communicatively interacting, who and what one “imagines” oneself to be, including from the imagined perspectives of others’.11 This thought or theory could be applied to our relationship with the self and the imagined state of living in a greater, symbiotic society. Our minds immediately evoke thoughts of Utopia. In essence, the practicality of living in Utopia is heavily burdened by the reality of what one witnesses in the media: savage, barbaric, brutal inhumane behaviors. A practical approach to manifesting large-scale change begins with acknowledging that the liminal spaces we dwell in need to be stabilized by changing our own perspectives of ourselves and others. Simple changes in our self’s daily lives need to be made, such as removing the self from violent environments even while presently experiencing and living the reality, whilst peaceful protests demand social changes such as reform, justice, communal engagement, nurturing other’s psyche, providing better job and educational opportunities, and cultivating meaningful, nonjudgmental alliances with all races and cultures. Then the lovely, poised, and curious gaze the viewer sees in Patsula’s work, a gaze making sense of herself and her environment, becomes a shared space with those living/experiencing the public space. Thus, the space that comes to terms with this becomes harmonious ground for the self/selves and nature to imagine an environment for society to thrive in.
Installation artist Giannina Dwin explores the meaning of environment, space, and landscape during the pandemic by creating a body of work that echoes nature’s soothing elements. Vamos a la Playa is a large-scale spatial installation consisting of salt. Dwin creates environments for viewers to experience and photographs the work. The images reflect scenes in nature often missed if the viewer is not present or tuned in to nature. In this instance, the environment appears to be the soft banks of a beach. It is another liminal space between here, there, now, or somewhere in our memory. The gentle movements of the ripples suggest the water’s ability to cleanse any surface it meets. It is as though the photograph is an invitation, a pleasant summons for the viewer to shift their gaze and presentness to a moment that evokes a sense of wellbeing. It is calming. The languid waves clear away what no longer serves the environment. It is a moment of peace. It is a moment of cleansing. It is by creating the supple ripples of salt that she delicately reminds the onlooker to gaze softly at a horizon we imagine possible; a momentary second of peace which cannot be described with language. Experiencing the liminal space between the real and the imaginary in Dwin’s work encourages the viewer to manifest a reality we are all aching to live.
- Beláxis Buil
Endnotes1. Lacan, Jacques, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-196-, The Seminar of Jaques Lacan,Routledge, NY, W.W. Norton & Company, NY, 1992
2. The Encyclopedia of Literacy and Cultural Theory: Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, WWW.OnlineLibrary.Wiley.com, Accessed May/June 2020
3. ibid.
4. The Chicago School of Media Theory, symbolic/real/imaginary, WWW.lucian.uchicago.edu, Accessed May/June 2020
5. ibid.
6. The university of Chicago: Theories of Media, symbolic, real, imaginary, WWW.csmt.uchicago.edu, Accessed May/June 2020
7. Lacan’s Orders: Fraud, Absence & Impossibility, Thought Cooperative, WWW.youtu.be/qypBF24g, Accessed May/June 2020
8. ibid.
9. ibid
10. Stephanie Patsula, Call of the Void, 2020, Artist Statement,
11. Jacques Lacan, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, WWW.plato.stanford.edu, Accessed May/June 2020
Edited by Global English Editing
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Sebastian Koseda, UK
THE BLACK FRIDAY PAINTINGS, 2020
Oil Paintings
THE BLACK FRIDAY PAINTINGS, 2020
Oil Paintings
David Prusko, USA
EPIDEMIC_PANDEMIC_ENDEMIC_SINDEMIC_Triptych_,2020
Video Art Collage & Sound
EPIDEMIC_PANDEMIC_ENDEMIC_SINDEMIC_Triptych_,2020
Video Art Collage & Sound
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Mark Osterman, USA
Waiting, 2020
Charcoal on Paper
Waiting, 2020
Charcoal on Paper
Curatorial Gesture(s), USA
No Playdate, 2020
Photography
No Playdate, 2020
Photography
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Carlene Muñoz
Mercury's Divination,2020 (Left)
Orion's Lament, 2020 (Right)
Mixed-Media on Paper
Mercury's Divination,2020 (Left)
Orion's Lament, 2020 (Right)
Mixed-Media on Paper
Stephanie Patsula, CA
Images of Daily Practice, 2020
Perfromance Art & Photography
Images of Daily Practice, 2020
Perfromance Art & Photography
Stephanie Patsula, CA
Images of Daily Practice, 2020
Perfromance Art & Photography
Images of Daily Practice, 2020
Perfromance Art & Photography
Denis Rovinskiy, RU
Untitled (self-portrait), 2017
Metal and plastic
Untitled (self-portrait), 2017
Metal and plastic
Sanam Efrani, IR
Sychrotechno, 2020
Performance, Sound & Video
Sychrotechno, 2020
Performance, Sound & Video
Carlene Muñoz,USA
Parabola, 2020 (Left) Pietra, 2020 (Right) Mixed-media on Paper |
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Carla Forte, VEN
Trepada en la Ventana, 2020
Performance Art, Choreography & Photography
Trepada en la Ventana, 2020
Performance Art, Choreography & Photography
Stephanie Patsula, CA
Images of Daily Practice, 2020
Perfromance Art & Photography
Images of Daily Practice, 2020
Perfromance Art & Photography
Giannina Dwin, USA
Vamos Aa la Playa, 2020
Salt Installation & Photography
Vamos Aa la Playa, 2020
Salt Installation & Photography