Sophie Lisa Beresford, The First and Second Creation, 2009

Sophie Lisa Beresford attempts to communicate her complex and unified world-view whilst also exploring her own problematic and paradoxical relationship to making ‘Art’ and to ‘Being’.Rather than make discreet objects for the delectation of a rarefied few, Beresford is instead truly living her art. Her work could best be described as a heady concoction of north-eastern English 'Charva' culture, new-age religion and DIY self-help. In a series of intimate video self-portraits musing on her artistic identity, we are faced with a conflation of church confessional and Big Brother diary room entry as she frets over the direction her life is taking. Frank and disarming, these clips are shown on her YouTube channel or are circulated to individuals, acting as markers for her ongoing progress. Then once a project is settled upon, Beresford often displays an unabashedly utopian impulse.Beresford’s serves to form a compelling and coherent map of her universe  The artist compares the process to navigating a castle in the Super Mario Brothers computer game: "Sincerity, in the case of my playing with it, is to experience myself, if I want to... the more sincere I become, the more I become like I was when I was a child… Playing Blocks' reality is a toy :) anything you want it to be.”

The First and Second Creation

Cecilia Stenbom, Alive - An Essential Guide to Survival, 2010

The work of Cecilia Stenbom leads an investigation into her conviction that in the consumer driven culture of a 21st century over saturated with information, fear has become a more powerful motivating factor than sex.Appropriation and re-enactment are central to Stenbom's methodology. Taking her source material from public distribution media such as television, movies, advertising, government information broadcast, 24-hour news, and the Internet, Stenbom frequently casts herself as the protagonist of a pastiche that examines our anxieties and desires, reinterpreting scenarios within mass media, retail, and domestic life."...I have become specifically interested in what triggers fear in contemporary life and how that fear is used to capture our attention and imagination, making us 'happy customers' and ultimately controlling us."Alive - An Essential Guide to Survival is the latest in an ongoing series of video works in which Stenbom performs an unsettling monologue to camera.Past works have included a guide to her collection of gadgets and a sideways look at US fat fighting drugs. In this case she provides us with a contemporary survival guide made up of official and unofficial advice on how to stay alive such as how to avoid being killed by an accident, by an infectious disease, or how to survive a terrorist attack.Stenbom presents a humorous and self-defeating world of narcissism and neurosis where everything from washing up to watching TV is fraught with danger and the potential to discover another way to die.

Moving Image - New York 2011
3 - 6 March 2011

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Moving Image - New York 2011

Moving Image - New York 20113 - 6 March 2011

Artworks

Moving Image - New York 2011
3 - 6 March 2011