rest

"rest." video. nichola feldman-kiss. 2005.

Nichola has been working hard on several projects, one of which is called “Rest.” Rest is a meditation on the body, or perhaps the absence of body. It is a 90 + minute video of Nichola folding a collection of beautiful late 60’s garments. This is what I wrote after seeing it:

“After seeing Rest I became aware of the level of attention you placed on the absence of the body...in this occasion, in the colorful clothes that you have painted onto the screen… in the silent words spoken to yourself and the neurosis expressed in a ritual performance without meaning. it’s a different form of rest… a more conscious rest at the level of the body. As you lay down each garment its like laying down a collapse… a gesture of reverence to the absence represented in the unworn clothes… peace in the sense of completion… in reckless acts of positioning."

This was her response in an interview I did with her last month:

Nichola: Maybe my work is more about nakedness than it is about the body.

Mark: Why?

Nichola: Well because if you look at my work from early on I have been studying femininity from the point of view of the male gaze… a conscious understanding of what nudity represented from the male gaze. The idea of nakedness is where I get to the body and the performance of the self. There is no real stable identity. The acknowledgement of whatever “we” is - is a performance. The performance has support in the accoutrements of self. It is through things that we build our identity. We express ourselves through our actions and discourse and how we carry ourselves. These are written into the body over time. Earlier I worked to strip away, make minimal or concentrate those accoutrements down to the level of the body…those that penetrate the body. I was looking at nakedness by removing the body…becoming even more naked. You were talking about the place of that vulnerability. Can you go further than naked? What happens when you get on the other side of naked and the attraction to that vulnerability?

Read the full interview on the artbeam site: www.artbeam.net.


fashion institute of technology.

When artbeam arrives in New York one of the things Nichola will be doing is meeting with the Fashion Institute of Technology to discuss a project involving their museum collection of garments. I will also be pitching Rest as a 24-hour cable television show. We'll call it therapy for the masses.

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