What is an Object?

This video titled "What is an Object?" utilizes collaged imagery (both found and original) to interrogate the objectification of women in film, art, and everyday life. The found footage features women viewed from behind, under the male gaze - whether viewed through the eyes of an artist, filmmaker, actor, or character. Using collage and a continuously shifting ground, the video renders something entirely apart from its components while relying on the context and framing of its fragments to do so. The women who were once subjects turned into objects (through the objectification of the male gaze) are now turned back into subjects through matter (that being the video, which also interrogates other material objects including film, painting, and sculpture). Not only are the women now subject matter, they are subjects that matter.

The installation of "What is an Object?" includes pieces that further explore material objects, including a digital picture frame propped on a shelving unit. This picture frame features a slide show of Constantin Brancusi’s sculptures of women - all photographed from behind. Additionally included are mirrored picture frames in which, depending on the fluctuating light from the video, the viewer is able to see varying degrees of the image behind the glass. At times, the viewer is confronted with the face of Gerhard Richter’s painting of Betty and Hitchcock’s Carlotta from the film Vertigo, while at other moments the viewer encounters their own face fully reflected in a mirror.