Using my own bodily experience & movement as a reference, this piece is part of a project focusing on the women--particularly dance hall girls and sex workers--who have been alternately silenced, glorified and vilified by the popular, male dominated Gold Rush narrative.
I attempt to undermine these tired and destructive patterns of language and belief that tend to pathologize women's bodies and sexuality, instead imagining a new visual language that considers what these women could have dreamed, felt and desired. Each mutoscope animates and honours the existence of one of the two young women in an historic photograph of Fairbanks Sex workers by George Akimoto. The mutoscope, an early cinematic device which was often used in the late 1800s/early 1900s to show film of exotic dancers, conveys ideas of voyeurism and control in its very design and history. As we turn the crank to flip through frames, we become part of the artwork and maybe can also consider where we fit into a problematic and frequently retold narrative. I wish, in at least a some small way, to undermine those historic belief systems that still make women and other people of marginalized genders and with a lived experience of misogyny feel unsafe within their own community and uncomfortable in their own skin. |
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