Squirm
Squirm: Larissa Fassler and Bettina Hoffman Screenings
October 5 to November 10, 2007
Opening: Friday, October 5 8pm
Artists’ talks: Saturday, October 6 12 noon
Visual artists Larissa Fassler and Bettina Hoffmann create fictionalized social conditions, which they then photograph and / or videotape. The resulting work opens disconcerting insight into the habits of interaction among friends, families and communities.
Larissa Fassler will present 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 masquerades as documentary, brings into sharp focus the self-consciousness of teenagers as they negotiate adult roles.
Bettina Hoffmann’s video La Ronde depicts domestic circumstances that are full of suggestions and expectations. For example, in one segment of La Ronde, her camera rotates slowly around a group that appears to be having a family dinner. As a seamless loop, the image emphasizes an unspoken tension among the assembled group. Critic Adrienne Lai describes 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 stage relational circumstances that reveal the arbitrary and contingent nature of social agreements. Against the backdrop of endless reality TV series, both artists offer a thoughtful reinterpretation of the contrivance of screen representation, and cause us to involuntarily squirm in self-reflection as we become actively involved in these subtle and barbed images.