Variations on Broken Lines

This paper, Variations On Broken Lines, parallels my exhibition, presented in Gales Gallery at York University, Toronto. Variations On Broken Lines is a site-specific multimedia installation comprising screendance work, multi-channel projection, sound, moving image sculpture, and objects. The paper is informed by my practice-based research that addresses notions of liminality and the in-between states of gestures expressed across dance and visual art forms. Through the articulation of gestures, I think about the possible connections between gesture, body, and the emergence of the body as an archival site. I investigate the aesthetics of liminality in gestures and multiple modes of inscription. I consider creative methods of practice as a means to return to the liminal, transformative, lived temporality of gestures through the reconstruction of historical and personal archives. Within the scholarly discourse on performance art, great attention has been devoted to performances relationship with its document. At the center of these discussions lie questions about the documentations ability to preserve and convey the embodied and time-based media experience of performance. Throughout this paper, I unfold theoretical grounding, modes of expression, and the methodologies utilized in my artistic practice. I weave between ideas and insights, theory and research, inspirations, and personal reflections. I have analyzed a variety of sourcesin anthropology, ethnography, dance, and visual artto offer theoretical frameworks within the context of my artistic practice and identity; I explore tensions between performative practices and visual media; and I examine how notions of liminality and the in-between are experienced from both the perspective of identity and the creative process, with an understanding that these perspectives will inevitably overlap.