Thursday, July 26, 2018

Thursday, July 5, 2018

Abject Flesh



"Significance is inherent in the human body."
-Julia Kristeva

Abject Flesh is a series of collages created by using various ephemera (such as scrap papers and torn book covers) and photographs found in old erotic magazines and discarded medical manuals. The work deals with the damaged body and subsequently negotiates issues such as fragility, impermanence, disease and death.
The collages could be described as a form of "abject art", a term first introduced in the 1990s by French psychoanalyst and literary theorist Julia Kristeva.  In her influential book Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection Kristeva talked about the idea of abjection as the basis of a differentiation between the self and non-self (the Other). For Kristeva the abject has an element of ambiguity: it is that which both revolts and attracts; she compares the aesthetic experience of the abject to a cathartic experience, “an impure process that protects from the abject only by dint of being immersed in it”.
Abject Flesh penetrates the most urgent taboos concerning the body and how we perceive it. The shocking and disturbing images force us to confront our innermost fears and agonies and attempt to illuminate those regions of our subconscious mind we would rather leave concealed. Ultimately the work challenges our preconceptions and ethical standards and provokes us to reexamine our established views on mor(t)ality.

View the series at:
http://konmark.com/gallery_738874.html