April 18-23, 2020
Wanbli Gamache
All He Ever Wanted
2020
dimensions variable
3D-printed sculpture, video/installation/performance
STATEMENT:
By augmenting conditions of authorship and intimacy, I look towards the audibility and legibility of media representation in erotic imagery, intimacy, and voyeurism. My work investigates the spectacle and personal vulnerability of my lived experience as a trans woman. In shifting components of voice, through its materiality and language, I provoke self-analysis within the spectacle.
I am pushing to understand the labor of my ever changing body in the landscape of eroticization and objectification. I look to the performative nature of transmitting my body in the context of pornography and sex work as a mode of locating pleasure in myself. I am asking the questions of how the presence ,and removal, of my body pertains to ways we think of pleasure and the consumption of identity in media. I employ a multitude of personas to investigate sex work, sexuality, gender, and the mediation of broadcasting bodies through digital recreations.
In my piece“ All He Ever Wanted” I re-materialized my past male body before I began medically transitioning as a transwoman. The 3D printed body is confronted with a video that strives to seduce my old self by confronting his past desires of wanting sexual contact with a transwoman. In retrospect, there is a question of how much he wanted to sleep with a transwoman or how much he wanted to become one. I am providing for a desire that he never had. He always wanted to sleep with a “tgirl”, so I have chosen to provide him that pleasure as I use a performance video to seduce my reborn male body. He never would have thought the transgirl he would have sex with would be me. Over the next few years I plan to slowly manifest his body into a “Real Life Sex Doll” that I will develop a sexual relationship with. I have already begun this intimacy with my past self as we both grow and develop in unison. The installation has a performance video of my current self in a sexualized context that shifts her gaze to the camera to seduce the 3D printed body through a confrontational placement of bodies. In this perception of themselves I call to the audience in how they perceive the sexualization of transgender bodies in the sex industry. The two selves are locked in confrontation of seeing their past, and their futures, in a singular moment. I ask for the audience, by the very nature of them witnessing this connection, to perform a introspection on what it means to find pleasure in the futurity of digital bodies.
BIO:
Wanbli Gamache (b.1989) is a Chicago based new media performance artist. She uses video, performance, and technology to reconstruct dynamics of spectacle and intimacy through eroticized mediation of body. In ritualized actions, Gamache addresses consumption and voyeurism through forms of reconstruction of her body. She is an alumni of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Film, Video, New Media, and Animation Department and currently lives and works in Chicago. Gamache has exhibited work at Links Hall (Chicago, IL), Sullivan Galleries, Zhou B Art Center, and ACRE Gallery (Chicago, IL); the Supernova Digital Animation Festival in Denver, Colorado, and recently a MANA Contemporary New Media Artist-in-residence.