to be veiled.
to be veiled.
The Process of Veiling and Unveiling.
With an interest in the corporeal, this performance-based video installation tackles questions surrounding an individual disappearance. “to be veiled.” investigates the performative body and allows it to remain unsettled in a state of unrest, approaching absence. By employing the body as a disappearing figure, “to be veiled.” visually articulates loss, lack and limitation through time-based media. Through a rupture of physical absencing, the work becomes a visual representation of the psyche and addresses ones ongoing struggle for continuance.
In practicing iconoclasm and in presenting an image of an atrophic figure, the work, “to be veiled.” undoes semblances and reconstructs dissemblance in hopes to make the invisible visually entrusted. To lie there, next to the figure in the barren plains, we are seized, carried off in the rise and fall and violent flaring of a cloth.
The woman, the cadaver, the being and the artist, all lay in resolution with one another within the figural form of the female body. The use of the veiled and unveiled female body is a reoccurring symbol in contesting discourses of nationalism, feminism, colonialism and resistance movements. While both, addressing these issues and speaking around them, the imagery of “to be veiled.” is of direct reference to draperies of the Renaissance period that veiled the dying and the dead female figures. In particular Caravaggio’s ‘Death of the Virgin’ where the icon of Mary passively lies in the pool of light draped in the folds of the shroud as those who mourn sink into the shadowed spaces along the contour. The body of Mary, dead or dying, awakens, in classical painting terms, the “flesh tints” (carnations) in relation to the fabrics (étoffes). Étoffes and carnations; the moment of the dying is elasticated by Caravaggio’s articulations between body and veil. “to be veiled.” reconciles with these classical painting terms by way of a durational articulation., one that is cyclical and endless.
The veil always folding, unfolding and refolding allows the cloth to dovetail, joining all the while keeping apart each fold, however, it never presents itself as such. Each pleat by itself but the retort of the other. In Derridian thought, we returned to the dialectics of the fold as manifold, the singular fold is never itself one but makes a plurality possible. In the folds of the linen there is a veil that unveils, not a revelation alone but a sentencing alike.
Through still life and tableau vivant and yet neither one nor the other, “to be veiled.” presents the act of absencing to visually form not the loss of the figure, nor the death to this figure but rather the death within, the death that composes the figure.
Faye Mullen, 2013
The Process of Veiling and Unveiling.
With an interest in the corporeal, this performance-based video installation tackles questions surrounding an individual disappearance. “to be veiled.” investigates the performative body and allows it to remain unsettled in a state of unrest, approaching absence. By employing the body as a disappearing figure, “to be veiled.” visually articulates loss, lack and limitation through time-based media. Through a rupture of physical absencing, the work becomes a visual representation of the psyche and addresses ones ongoing struggle for continuance.
In practicing iconoclasm and in presenting an image of an atrophic figure, the work, “to be veiled.” undoes semblances and reconstructs dissemblance in hopes to make the invisible visually entrusted. To lie there, next to the figure in the barren plains, we are seized, carried off in the rise and fall and violent flaring of a cloth.
The woman, the cadaver, the being and the artist, all lay in resolution with one another within the figural form of the female body. The use of the veiled and unveiled female body is a reoccurring symbol in contesting discourses of nationalism, feminism, colonialism and resistance movements. While both, addressing these issues and speaking around them, the imagery of “to be veiled.” is of direct reference to draperies of the Renaissance period that veiled the dying and the dead female figures. In particular Caravaggio’s ‘Death of the Virgin’ where the icon of Mary passively lies in the pool of light draped in the folds of the shroud as those who mourn sink into the shadowed spaces along the contour. The body of Mary, dead or dying, awakens, in classical painting terms, the “flesh tints” (carnations) in relation to the fabrics (étoffes). Étoffes and carnations; the moment of the dying is elasticated by Caravaggio’s articulations between body and veil. “to be veiled.” reconciles with these classical painting terms by way of a durational articulation., one that is cyclical and endless.
The veil always folding, unfolding and refolding allows the cloth to dovetail, joining all the while keeping apart each fold, however, it never presents itself as such. Each pleat by itself but the retort of the other. In Derridian thought, we returned to the dialectics of the fold as manifold, the singular fold is never itself one but makes a plurality possible. In the folds of the linen there is a veil that unveils, not a revelation alone but a sentencing alike.
Through still life and tableau vivant and yet neither one nor the other, “to be veiled.” presents the act of absencing to visually form not the loss of the figure, nor the death to this figure but rather the death within, the death that composes the figure.
Faye Mullen, 2013
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