Squirm

Artists: Larissa Fassler (Berlin) and Bettina Hoffmann (Montreal)

Date: October 5 to November 10, 2007

Artist Talk: Saturday, October 6, 12 p.m. 

Fassler and Hoffmann created fictionalized social conditions, which they then photographer and/ or videotape. The resulting work opened disconcerting insight into the habits of interaction amoung friends, families and communities.

Larissa Fassler presented photographs and video work from her three-part series Teen Couples I (2003), Teen Couples II (2005) and Teen Couples III (2007). In 2003, Fassler asked a group of 14-year olds to pose as they believed “a couple looks.” She videotaped them when they were 16 and then again this past summer. Her project, which masqueraded as documentary, brought into sharp focus the self-consciousness of teenagers as they negotiate adult roles.

Bettina Hoffmann’s video La Ronde depicted domestic circumstances that were full of suggestions and expectations. For example, in one segment of La Ronde, her camera rotated slowly around a group that appeared to be having a family dinner. As a seamless loop, the image emphasized an unspoken tension among the assembled group. Critic Adrienne Lai described the effect of La Ronde as, “The mild vertigo produced by this continuous revolving motion echoes the existential nausea produced by my continued sense of social and physical alienation from/within the scene."

Both Fassler and Hoffmann staged relational circumstances that revealed the arbitrary and contingent nature of social agreements. Against the backdrop of endless reality TV series, both artists offered a thoughtful reinterpretation of the contrivance of screen representation, and caused us to involuntarily squirm in self-reflection as we became actively involved in these subtle and barbed images.

Larissa Fassler

Bettina Hoffmann