 PAM PATTERSON
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| VISUAL PERFORMANCE AUDIO/VIDEO STATEMENT BIO RESUME EMAIL
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ARTIST STATEMENT For over 30 years, I have exploited my life experiences of rape, abuse, and ridicule to fuel performances and exhibitions. While trained in the visual arts, I also studied classical and experimental theatre. I screamed in Dada, wept in Chekhov, photographed, made videos, built installations, and drew - making startling connections. All this speaks to a practice that has been developed and enriched over time and is hence time-dependent. I speak of my work as performative or time-based for time is ever present, built into the making and/or the presentation of the work. The forms I choose to use in my work are suited to this process. My performances, mixed media installations, photos, drawings and videos contain many personal and specific images or texts. My intention is to discuss how women have been/are being formed and to reveal our attempts to negotiate or resist this formation. The tension in the work is between the personal/subjective and the formal/objective, which raises questions for me as the nature of feminist research practices, feminist art practices, and women’s evolving roles as workers, negotiators, and survivors in a Western technological society. As a disability artist, I have produced works for various settings ranging from drawings of my mastectomized breast that accompanied a performance where I ritually reshaped my surgically-altered body for FADO in “Cellu(H)er Resistance”, to “Red Square” presented as performance/video for TorinoPERFORMANCEART International Festival, Italy in which I addressed the impact of repressive colonized institutionalized spaces on bodies. Work – visual and performative - made during the pandemic, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, explored “COVID-19 Anxiety”. Also, during pandemic isolation, I collaborated with UK performance artist Alisa Oleva on international “walks”. |