the original instructions for the participants: click to enlarge

My work is an amalgam of sculpture, video, photography and performance. I am invested in creating objects that serve to unite these mediums in a coherent and pluralistic fashion. The objects that I make are specific to the body’s extension into shared spaces and are used as conduits for expression and interaction within private and public arenas. The work is dependent on a human “wearer” that comes to the work embedded with the social relevance of today’s society in which human contact and human spheres are being minimized by technology and our jump into the digital domain.

I am a people person; I am devoted to bringing people into my work, to share an experience with them on a physical, mental or emotional level. I am interested in our interaction through the work- I make it to start the conversation, the viewer sees and reacts to it, or the “wearer” engages and responds directly back to me.

“Wearer,” a word found in most of the “medium” or “materials” lines of my slide lists or labels, is specific in its use but unspecific in its application. I have usually used myself as a “wearer” simply because I have free access to this body that I inhabit. My work is about making extensions and appendages that point to the sites where the body ends and space begins. This space can be public or private, physical or ethereal, social or political.

In this piece, “1, 2, 3 and Thanks,” I reach out to the (often silent) witnesses of the art object. This move to create a dialog with the audience is something that I have always desired, and I am interested in the implications of involving the viewer into my work.

For this piece, there is a very real extension of the body, through the camera and onto the monitor, which becomes my “property.” This is the site where the wearer and I meet in an orchestrated social sphere. The wearer has performed for herself or himself, while knowing that there will be yet another viewer, someone whom they do not know. This boundary between the viewer/wearer and me, the maker, is an extension of earlier works that desire a demarcation of identifiable margins, as well as an expansion of those boundaries.

As the wearer acts out their given “expressions” they bridge the gap between clichE and real sentiment. They are forced into a unity of body and mind that allows them to enact expressions through their physical features- an outward signifier of emotion that is recognizable by others. I am interested in the body language that results and the constant waivering in and out of expression. This piece conveys understood communication signals between the wearer and their image and also between the image and me, the director.

-Natalie Rishe
10.18.05