Leisure

How one becomes what one is

As artists-in-residence at the Visual Collections Repository and the Canadian Women Artists History initiative at Concordia, we investigated the holdings of the slide collection with a focus on the practices of historical female artists. While in residence in the collection, we were reminded of the diptych-like slide presentations of our undergraduate years studying art history. This double projector system historically formed the structural basis for so much comparative research and pedagogy in the field of art history. Using two analogue projectors to look at our selected slides, and new slides we created on site, we were inspired by a moment when images started to overlap in interesting ways. In the presentation we have made overlaps as conscious  decisions, creating new images in loose collage-pairings. In this way, our exploratory and intuitive method aims to draw out surprising details from the collection and to create new juxtapositions. 

Working with slides from the VCR that reproduce works made by women artists and designers, How one becomes what one is, makes atmospheric reference to a play by Lina Loos written between 1902-1906. The play tells the story of its main protagonist “Ali” (a close anagram to Lina’s own name) through a series of four conversational vignettes staged within carefully articulated spaces. These settings reflect the journey that Ali takes in the narrative from a passive young woman who inhabits spaces designed by others to control her, to the ultimate creation of her own room. The play is performed as much by the settings as by the characters, allowing for a complex and changing sense of occupancy, ownership and identity. At its core this project deals with a process of personal transformation and breaking out of expected norms.