Olivia Savage
AN EXTREMELY COMFORTABLE
AND RELAXING EXPERIENCE
Video Performance
A psychoanalytic approach to exploring the identity within. What lies beneath the surface? The artist’s video performance explores the boundaries of the conscious and subconscious by using techniques simultaneously that are commonly known to expose both parts of the mind. Inspired by the relaxing nature of baking, homeliness and ASMR techniques, the performance creates a soft atmosphere, carefully designed to inflict calming emotions. This experience is then injected over and over and over with sharp, squelching, uncomfortable noises and the psychical force of nails into the kneading process until they are entirely enclosed in the bread, no longer to be seen. The viewer is then left with an imperfect but perfectly nurtured loaf of bread. On the surface it is secure; its crusted layer of skin beautifully masking the complex, binary opposition inside that is the cold, hard metal against the soft air pockets of freshly baked dough. This experience overall presents sensory experiences intended to automatically relax the viewer while at the same time disrupting them repetitively to shock into a conscious state. This tightrope between the two states, is a boundary that exists within every individual yet one we know nothing about. At what point does the conscious transition into subconscious? Is it possible for both to exist at once despite feeling so drastically distant to one another?
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