Drawing

Item Description

Critic's Choice 2023 Choix de la critique 2023

It Rubs Off, 2023, Pastel on Paper and video art, performance, 16.5 in x 24.5 in

This piece is a monoprint rubbing of bathroom signs and an accompanying video artwork of the performance that led to its production. While a monoprint rubbing on the surface, the work can also be understood as the documentation of an ongoing performance and sustained engagement of the artist with the historic and exclusionary gender binary.

Tierney’s creative practice dovetails with their social practice of initiating individual and collective transformation through the process of disarticulating the gender binary. The gender binary is a colonial tool used to regulate bodies and foster unequal relations. The significance of performing a rubbing on the bathroom signs offers many interpretations: from the historic capturing of our specific cultural moment in which trans rights are variously instrumentalized to sustain unequal power relations, to the broader metaphoric reading of the gender binary as a conditioned internalization of larger power structures. On the one hand, ideologies of dominance are inscribed in our social conditioning and “rub off” on us in insidious, often unconscious ways, and on the other hand, signs and symbols, if repeatedly scrubbed with the right pressure, can be rubbed off to produce spaces where new meaning and relations can emerge.  The act of rubbing also evokes feelings of care, feelings of attachment, feelings of arousal – all of which are variously at play in our relationship to concepts of gender.

The bathrooms signs used in this work are in the University of Ottawa’s visual arts building. In 2018, the department’s faculty unilaterally decided to degender 50% of its washrooms. This piece invites use to think about how we, as a society, socially transition through this moment, while enacting care for all our relations in our immediate communities.

It Rubs Off, 2023, pastel sur papier, art vidéo, performance, 16,5 po x 24,5 po

Cette œuvre est composée d’un frottage en monotype de panneaux de salle de bain accompagné d’une œuvre d’art vidéo. Bien qu’il s’agisse au premier niveau d’un frottage en monotype, l’œuvre peut également être comprise comme la documentation d’une performance en cours et de l’engagement soutenu de l’artiste avec la conception historique et discriminatoire de la binarité du genre. La personne qui possèdera ce document de performance acquiert non seulement une œuvre d’art physique, mais aussi une œuvre d’art vidéo qui documente le processus (ou la performance) de la création de l’œuvre.

Item Special Note

Artist Website/Site Web de l'artiste: http://www.caratierney.com/ & www.phantomtits.ca

Cara Tierney (they/them) is a white trans, transdisciplinary artist, and educator who lives and works on the traditional unceded land of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. Their practice investigates the way meaning is structured in, around and through the body, and is oriented towards building more equitable, and sustainable futures.

L’artiste transdisciplinaire blanche, Cara Tierney (iel) œuvre en éducation et vit et travaille sur les terres traditionnelles non cédées de la nation algonquine Anishinaabe. Sa pratique s’intéresse à la manière dont le sens est structuré dans, autour et à travers le corps, pour s’orienter vers la création d'un avenir plus équitable et durable.