The body, the imago, and the intermezzo
Jemima Wyman's world is inherently eclectic, hyperactive, and played out in a universe that is subject to her own pataphysical logic. In this space, the collapse of reason and binaries gives way to a continually evolving system of alterity that is chaotic, anxious, wildly funny, and often confrontational. Like a shapeshifter morphing between intimate and alien forms, Wyman has a strangely unrestrained way of transforming the contingencies of her subjectivity, and the boundaries of her art practice. This practice occupies the charged space of the in-between, slipping between object and video, painting and performance, installation and audience, self and other. This is not a space confined to her; it is for many younger artists an obvious site of habitation, a zone unmarked by the claustrophobic demands of specificity and classification. It is in this twilight zone of the monstrosities and fantasies that haunt contemporary art practice, this frenetic site of desire and fame, that the challenges for locating whom we are, become both compelling and horrifying.
While the arrival at such an elusive and eccentric practice as Wymans has sources in the situation aesthetics of the '70s, it also has mutated through the densely saturated media environments of the last thirty years. The phenomenological model that informs her practice, and underscored the more durable and interesting practices that have grown from the '70s, has, as its core, questions about subject-object relationships, and the perception and reception of these. Robert Morris comments on the radical shifts in conceptualizing the spatial organisation of object/body/architecture,
The awareness of scale is a function of ... comparison ... Space between the subject and the object is implied in such a comparison ... it is just... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline