Malissa Canez BFA Thesis Fall 2010
Untitled Identity
This thesis is an investigation of the concept of identity as movement, as unpredictable, uncertain, and indeterminate and further as a reflection upon feelings of displacement. Using my personal experience as the foundation for this investigation, I explore identity through the contradictions present within cultural and religious smbolisms, media, personal and historical memoery and lived experience; where the nature of identity is placed in that of uncertainty between the sensory of perception, and the quest of belonging with and against the other. Further, I talk about identity as a cultural construct, made for dealing with our anxiety towards the certainty of our changing reality.
The work I have made for this thesis is an installation comprised of three moving image works and two large-scale prints. Each piece appropriates media from the past, and re-contextualizes it within the framework of digital media, thus creating a dialogue between the historical past and the questionable present. I appropriate such media in hopes of breaking the authority of the images themselves, in hopes of voiding them their historicity. It is through their destruction that displacement is characterized and a movement towards a new articulation is born, between what was and what is.