Exposed

Exposed (2019) is the exploration and interrogation of one's own body while being under the surveillance of an audience. The viewer is asked to lay down face up and trace their own body. They are then recorded with a DSLR camera that is connected to a live feed and projected on to a wall. 

I have become an essentialist in my life. The most essential thing in our lived being our own bodies. We are psychologically obsessed with ourselves whether that is in a positive way or a negative way something I took from Laura Mulvey's essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema as she explores ideas of Lacan and Freud to define phallocentric politics in film. The directions were explicitly written on the white board for the first viewer, as people lie down on the white board they are wiped away.  I bring inspiration from Richard Serra whose work was notable for being interactive, but in a very dictative manner in being direct with the viewer about how to interact with the work. The directions disappeared, but a precedence was set for the following viewers and even without the directions one can assume what need be done. 

What is left at the end is a body on the white board. This body lacks gender, personality, age, race, and ability. It is the embodiment of the post-identity utopian society we only read about or project into movies. It is the essentials, a body.

Outside of the exploration of identity is a broader more current exploration of surveillance. 
I gained this idea from looking at the works of Rafael Lozan-Hemmer and his work with people interacting in one space being one work, but the other work being the projection of those people playing in that space for a different viewer. In current political arenas this is a hot topic and it's something that many people are thinking about and building up anxieties over.