Christine D'Onofrio // Cat Cat Cat
Date:
Fri, Sep 8th, 2023 to Sat, Oct 21st, 2023Time:
6:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Description:
Through her work, Christine D’Ornofrio negotiates the tensions and promises of power found in acts of humour, virtue, narcissism, humiliation, desire, technology and community.
The moments she exploits point to intuitive effects and ideologies, sometimes seen as ‘accidents’ to reveal characteristics of mediation that tie personal and political agency.
A focus of her practice is to build dialogue between subject position and the histories, achievements and fallacies of feminist art via mediation and technology. In former works, she has implied that a change in perspective can present an alternative to a rigid systematic structure, or she has confronted her fear of depicting the female body in the conditions of representation by utilizing the gesture of falling that carries both potential and failure. D’Onofrio revealed the contradictions between subversive and derogatory effects of humour, and revealed the power of codes as attributed to tears as simultaneously material and simulated existing within the same referent, or the generative nature of intuitive and tacit connections that influence and are foundational to a creative community.
D’Onofrio struggles with the notion of liberty and its limitations within structures, whether; representational, conceptual, social, economic, political. She reveals the forces of capitalist patriarchy, individualistic neoliberalism and colonial practices that ultimately direct and exploit potential fluid ‘grey zones’, and expose what further facilitates and perpetuates power. Since we working within the system, how can one imagine the potential act of liberty? How can new meaning be created, produced and organized or how can one erupt the production of meaning altogether -and still survive? For subjects to not belong to something, free of titles, codes and limitations, it would exist in crisis. In her work she asks for some concept of liberation to be realized, but liberation only exists when it does not know its end.
At the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, D’Onofrio exhibits a new work that critiques agency as it ‘belongs to’ representational systems, in this case a white female spinster, crazy “cat lady”, pseudo-feminist icon. Her inquiry into the function of social and cultural oppressions to ensure perpetuating power structures perform themselves is to discover new portrayals of the ageing white female embodiment and privilege. Because co-opted depictions of rebellion make revolutionary actions defunct of their power, she questions our place in an intersectional self-aware social, cultural and political theory and deliberately engage both the triumphs and perils of feminist art practice, history and visual culture.
cat cat cat will be on view in our Main Gallery from September 8th - October 20th, 2023. Join us at the Alternator on September 8 from 6-8pm for a triple opening reception alongside Wilson S. Wilson in the Project Gallery and Hana Hamaguchi in the Members’ Gallery. RSVP here.
Venue:
Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art
Address:421 Cawston Avenue (unit 103), Kelowna
Cost:
FreeFor more info:
Ph: (250) 868-2298
Email: info@alternatorcentre.com
Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art
About Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art
Our editors are the pulse of the town! Find out which events WE are going to! Daily updates.