Caroline Monnet
ART Habens
cheap, it was willing to do questionable things for the sake of the art and it was always available to me. It has been a challenge to present the work publically because of that thing we all carry around, called shame and self-consciousness. I have learned to let this go, for the most part. I have become more interested instead in both the physical endurance and discomfort of making the work and in the awkward director / actor relationship that heightens the tension and questions the methodology of control in the image. I hope that because I am just a regular person( and not a trained stunt double) putting myself into these scenarios, that there is a certain degree of empathy that strengthens the issue of direct experience for the viewer.
I am always working with double meanings, puns and literal subversions in my work. I really like how language is contradictory: it is slippery and difficult to pin down yet weighs very heavily when imposed onto a subject or group of individuals with the intention of locking it / them down with a definitive definition. I think that people are generally more comfortable when things are categorized into neat boxes with tidy labels. When we are presented similar stories and representations over and over again, we are happy to accept
21 406 Special Issue