No contact. Please touch.

Posted on: May 4, 2018
Views: 1173

Description

Social interaction feels like a game where I'm not privy to the rules and intimacy and play are obscured by an isolating and serious facade. By employing recognizable symbols in the making of absurd objects for interaction, I intend to subvert normative social experience to acknowledge its perpetual mediation. This created alternate reality, a mingling of bodies and objects, is motivated by the non-intimacy of a reliance on social media and continued inundation of mass produced objects as a fulfillment of tactile desire, a replacement of human touch.

Please touch, play, investigate, and interact.




Shawna Duval

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BFA Alumni

Major: Metalsmithing & Jewelry

Graduation Year: 2018


Artist Statement:

Through the construction of an interactive dreamscape, I intend to break the contemporary function of objects as a replacement for social interaction, using them instead to comment on a desire for contact and a lost playfulness. These familiar things, minimal and artificial, live as instruments of play as opposed to toys, more in communication with art-objects, electronics, or medical tools. Monochromatic metals, plastics, and rubbers displace the warmth of wood and flesh. By playing through materiality with the history of objects as symbols, they break from any original referents to perform an in-between, within reach of both the real and constructed reality. All at once, this space is playful, intimate, fluid, scientific and cold. There’s a rigidity to the Truth we’ve built with words, and a belief that children are somehow inferior for their lack of concrete categorization. This not only inhibits play, but a fluidity of the real. I want to implicate the body in order to access a more honest, unmediated, childlike awareness.

https://portfolio.meca.edu/
https://portfolio.meca.edu/