After/Birth

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 4th, 2018, 6-8pm

Exhibition Run: Thursday, October 4th - Saturday, October 27th, 2018

After/Birth is returning to the point of origin to access something that’s already gone; to understand where it has come from, where it is going, if and where it ends. In their respective pieces, Ciolfi and O’Neal use their bodies as a means of understanding, in an intimate sense... their creation.

In her piece, Gestation Period, O’Neal explores a return to her birth, inserting herself into her mother’s position as a young girl, being thrust into the woes of parenthood. It is through this process that the artist attempts to piece together the factors in her life that contributed to or influenced her birth and their relationship thereafter.

This process of transference is echoed in Ciolfi’s piece, Failure to Preserve, as the artist returns to her body in a cyclical attempt to preserve its likeness using plaster and wax. In her piece, Ciolfi demonstrates the human need for memorialization, how when one thing is created, another dies, and that these two forces create an infinite cycle of death and rebirth. She explores our need to access what is gone through what remains.

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Failure to Preserve by Rachel Ciolfi:

Failure to Preserve depicts a failure of the index. It is trying to preserve something that has already died the moment it has begun. The index is the need to return—to differentiate for ourselves our need to keep, and our need to exert control over forces that preservation cannot stop. In this work, the artist uses her body as a source, returning to it multiple times to make sculptures of herself from plaster and wax. These materials that have been historically used for preserving the likeness of the dead, become a platform for translation rather than permanence.

This piece is a document of a performance, wherein the artist used plaster to cast her body parts in stages. Wax sculptures made from the casts were melted back onto her body, generating a cycle of forms. The cyclical nature of this work urges viewers to consider that preservation is a concern of the finite, not the infinite, and that what appears to be death is only change.

This work originated from the artist’s need to address her discomfort with change, and memorialize the loss of a version of herself. The work was first an attempt to symbolically reconcile the past and present body by physically combining them, but doing so only exaggerated the divide between the two. The initial ritualistic process transformed into a need to maintain access to a former self, to feel a level of control over an aspect of the self that is inherently in constant flux. The multitude of forms echo failed attempts at creating an accurate copy of the original.

The video documentation of the performance is fragmented in itself, and exhibits the overall fleeting process of attempted reclamation and preservation, generating a document whose imperfection reflects the events themselves. Much in the way that memories blend together over time, the documentation of the performances slowly layer and recede. This layering is reminiscent of Plato’s analogy of the wax tablet, wherein memories are imprinted in wax but are subject to being overwritten by newer or stronger impressions, much like the exhibited forms are subject to being distanced from the original each time they are revisited.

Evidence of the physical attempts act as remnants, sculptural forms that maintain an evidential connection with the process not possible to garner from the video. These forms, however, can never truly account for their source; they exist only as empty shells of failed reconciliation.

Failure to Preserve thrives on the tension between a longing and need for the index, and the lamenting that must coexist with it—these two poles drive an unrelenting cycle of death and rebirth.

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Gestation Period by Kadiejra O'Neal:

But I can’t help but feel this incredible longing…

A longing for connection…

a longing for warmth and a love I’m sure I’ve felt before…

This is an emotional and psychological investigation into my origin...

This is my attempt at trying to understand what my mother went through as a young island girl being thrust into woos of parenthood...

This is me trying to figure out what was going on in her head…her thought process…her worries...

This is me trying to piece together the factors in her life that contributed to or influenced my birth and our relationship thereafter...

This is a retrospective look at a mother-daughter relationship, in hopes of being able to find a deeper maternal bond in our present dynamic.

If the emotional blockage is from me, then I too must go through my own Gestation Period…

Gestation Period is a performance video grounded in themes of personal history, mother daughter relationships, tension and struggle.