ILONA SZWARC I am a woman and I feast on memory

I am a woman and I feast on memory. I am a woman and I construct through deconstruction. I perform myself.

As a foreigner to this country, I stand outside the dominant order while immersed in my own process of becoming. This position, unique in that it is my own, and communal in that it is a space I share with so many others, is the source of my interrogation.

As a woman, it is in my nature to engage a perpetual process of creation, turning the self into an experiment in reproduction. Employing the use of look-alikes, women who I believe share my general appearance, I am exploring aspects of mirroring, staging and performance, seeing myself in the face of the other. I am interested in notions of becoming - how an individual assimilates and makes oneself imperceptible in society while engaging a series of internal transformations aimed at finding a kernel of truth amidst the noise.

Taking inspiration from stage make-up tutorials, I am playing with the surfaces that we construct to produce and affirm our identity. The intersection of painting, cinema and theatre allows me to adopt a directorial mode and test the nature of authority, perhaps even wresting it from the arms of culture. By following instruction manuals and reinterpreting them through my female gaze, often mimicking the persona of a male make-up artist, I am able to see what happens when gender roles are reversed and lines blur between passive and active bodies. By dismantling these false constructs, by taking apart the language of identification,I give birth to hybrid identities and in-between spaces, ones ripe with the tensions, breakthroughs and catharsis that take place within the sphere of possibility.

Through the ways that my characters inhabit their bodies and domestic spaces, the relationship between women, memory and time surfaces. Memories of childhood, memories of other women, memories of the lost self, primordial memory, cultural memory, familial memory, a certain "feminine" tendency towards sentimentality. Memories molded by male consciousness. Memories reconstituted by feminism.

This process of becoming - the abstract line - disrupts any sense of chronological, linear narrative and prevents meaning from unfolding. At times, it can appear obscure and haunting, the gestures violent and aggressive, a primitive act of mark-making. Through my experiments, I have found that becoming is a process of elimination, a construction that moves progressively towards a void, an erasure of meaning, a subversive act of annihilation.

The ultimate negation is death. The corpse becomes a character. At first, I would observe myself in the eyes of the double, an act of mimicry that mirrored myself back to me, all the intricate details of how I embody and occupy myself. Now, I imagine myself in a space of emptiness.

the aging body
the body in crisis
the animal body
the madonna
the whore
the cyborg
rebirth
renewal
resurrection