Continuums

Over the past decades, Ariane Thézé has carried out an inquiry on the body and the process involved in its representation. Questions around identity, desire, memory and loss are central sites of explorations in the artist’s multidisciplinary practice that encompasses sculpture, video, and photography. Continuums, brings together her recent evocative digitally manipulated photographs that are oriented towards a reflection between female bodies and natural landscapes.

Thézé’s artworks are situated within a conceptual framework that seeks to resist, reverse, and deconstruct the dualist oppositions that informs patriarchal Western language and thinking: male/female, mind/body, culture/nature, object/subject. Her approach is one of non-duality, which blurs the boundaries of these binaries. The artist, through the female body, reclaims nature as an active undomesticated space, shifting from the traditional definition, which equates femininity with passiveness, delicacy, decorativeness, and domesticity¹.

Through the photographic medium, Ariane Thézé records the markings and traces of female bodies in the landscapes. While their identities are unrecognizable, their presences are assertive and engaged. Similar to the growth rings of trees that reflect traces of time, the body also undergoes transformations through time and space.

[1] Stacy Alaimo. Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Elia Eliev, Curator