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1media/Screen Shot 2023-04-03 at 12.42.56 AM.png2023-03-31T11:51:06-07:00Evelyn Burvant9983db2c9a777261e1300e636bee4e2835958cc8426759Maskplain2023-04-11T06:23:40-07:00Evelyn Burvant9983db2c9a777261e1300e636bee4e2835958cc8By using my own face as the mold for this Posthuman Mask, I have intentionally inserted myself into the piece. Covering my face in the various tech/animal paraphernalia reference other ontologies that I’ve then modeled and fused with my own face/ identity. This then situates me as an equally hybrid form because of my new fused relationship to the bones and the wires and everything they represent.
I think it is also worth mentioning my own stake in all of these discourses. I am a woman therefore my gender becomes a key part of my identity and also a key part of the discourses already written onto my body. My face (my woman’s face) is indexed into this work which allows for my gender connects me to the previous themes for both Dolly and for the gendered reading of Can't Help Myself. However as I built it, I found that my feminine features began to wash away. I am not a professional sculpture, and I anticipated for the mask to not resemble me. Again, I wanted to lean into the fluid nature of the task at hand, I didn't want to cast it aside if it came out differently than I expected. Keeping its creation bound by those constraints seemed counterintuitive, even going against Braidotti's mentioning of art as being able to transcend our very limits. For me I allowed my limits to guide what I created.
Dolly the Sheep is a creature whose entire existence is a convergence of science and nature. She is an animal yes, but she is also a bio-creation therefore cannot be either one or the other because of her and her body’s history. Can’t Help Myself calls to how we project human characteristics onto a nonhuman entity and how that can in some way make them more human (once they demonstrate behaviors outside their previous realm of categorization). And here I am, scraping together bits of newspaper and old computer wires. I fall into this as a creator, as a living thing/entity/being, as a woman, as a thinker, and as something able to die. Some part of me is able to connect with the machine as much as with the animal. In my last progress picture I mentioned, briefly, how the masks asks for an engagement with the viewer. If you choose to don the mask you become a part of it and its history. Pieces of it may fall off, pieces may break, but for a moment, you/we all become connected.
