Water Scars

source: ruaminx

Through her manipulation of clothing and skin, Donna Huanca uses the energy of objects to show the overdeveloped, fetishistic tactility of cultural processes, thereby activating a subconscious, prelinguistic memory.
Clothing—inserted in rituals that define the body’s everyday intimacy and social practices—is a cultural transmission medium, a subjectification tool, but also an interface steeped in anxiety.
As a way of assimilating and appropriating, it appears here as a process of identity-construction and as denaturalisation. In her performance installations, makeup modifies the person by an instrumental coefficient in which the self-staging ceremony no longer aims to be part of a relationship of alterity, but rather one of dissimulation, fusion, camouflage—furnishing the beginnings of a sometimes-absurd poetic narrative on the fragmentation of identity.
This attention to the spiritual dimension of the envelope is all about examining the body’s contemporary discourse, the space-time of the hesitant metamorphosis between rebirth and depersonalisation. In an ever-ambivalent, unrhetorical way, Donna Huanca shows how the body is sculpted by its environment, determined by a process of mimetic absorption, driven to forms of dissolution that the artist makes seem like psychotropic methods of depersonalisation and a liberating form of schizophrenia.
The artist’s large-scale installations combine tactile materials, clothing, shoes, fabrics or found objects, which she deconstructs and freezes in the painting. Recombined with plastic or latex materials, or superimposed in layers on stretchers, the used or worn objects give rise to new artefacts. Linked in space through a network of semantic and plastic connections, the static elements are activated during performances, in which living models, infused and crystallised in the installation, start interacting with the works.
The body always remains the central agent in the succession of tableaux vivants. The ecstatic or impassive attitudes of the models causes them to ceaselessly evolve, from reverence and withdrawal towards a vulnerability, due to the breaking of that protective barrier, as a result of their overexposure. Thus camouflage and make-up, this dressing up and burying create a constant confusion between predation and seduction, sensual pleasure and cruelty.
Between control and spontaneity, whether consecrated and raised on podiums or exhibited under glass, reassembled into a totem, the bodies and the objects are inserted into an allegorical system that places self-care rituals and contemporary hedonism alongside archaic and primitive forms of socialisation. The emergence of identity through a series of artifices, stagings and masks shields it from the ascendency of rituals, but only in order to immediately give it over to a stressful multiplicity of perspectives.
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source: galeriechezvalentin

A travers sa manipulation du vêtement et de la peau, Donna Huanca utilise l’énergie des objets pour mettre en évidence la tactilité hypertrophiée, fétichiste, des processus culturels, activant par là une mémoire subconsciente et pré-linguistique.

Le vêtement, inséré dans les rituels qui définissent l’intimité du quotidien et les pratiques sociales du corps, est un véhicule de transmission culturelle, un outil de subjectivation, mais aussi une interface imprégnée d’anxiété. Comme mode d’assimilation et d’appropriation, il apparaît ici à la fois comme processus de construction de l’identité et comme dénaturation. Dans ses installations performances, le maquillage affecte la personne d’un coefficient instrumental dans lequel la cérémonie de la mise en scène de soi ne vise plus à s’inscrire dans un rapport d’altérité, mais de dissimulation, de fusion, de camouflage. — fournissant les prémices d’une narration poétique et fantasmatique, sur l’étoilement de l’identité.

Cette attention portée à la dimension spirituelle de l’enveloppe interroge le discours contemporain du corps, l’espace-temps de la métamorphose hésitant entre renaissance et dépersonnalisation. De manière toujours ambivalente, non rhétorique, Donna Huanca montre comment le corps est sculpté par son environnement, déterminé par un processus d’absorption mimétique, conduit vers des modes de dissolution que l’artiste fait entrer en résonance avec des méthodes de dépersonnalisation psychotropiques et une forme de schizophrénie libératrice.

Les installations à grande échelle de l’artiste combinent des matériaux tactiles, vêtements, chaussures, tissus, ou objets de récupération, qu’elle déconstruit, et fige dans la peinture. Recombinés avec des matériaux plastiques, latex, ou superposés en couches sur des châssis, les objets usagés ou portés donnent naissance à de nouveaux artefacts. Reliés dans l’espace par un réseau de correspondances, sémantiques et plastiques, les éléments statiques sont activés lors des performances au cours desquelles des modèles vivants, camouflés, cristallisés dans l’installation entrent en interaction avec les œuvres.

Le corps reste toujours l’agent central dans la succession de tableaux vivants qui se succèdent. Les attitudes extatiques ou impavides des modèles les font sans cesse évoluer du recueillement, du retrait, vers une vulnérabilité due à l’éclatement de cette barrière protectrice, du fait de leur surexposition. Ainsi, camouflage et maquillage, travestissement et enfouissement opèrent un jeu constant de brouillage entre prédation et séduction, volupté et cruauté.

Entre contrôle et spontanéité, sacralisés et élevés sur des podiums ou exposés sous des vitres, recomposés en totem, les corps et les objets s’insèrent dans un système allégorique qui met en parallèle les rituels du “self care” et de l’hédonisme contemporain avec les modes archaïques et primitifs de socialisation. L’émergence de l’identité à travers une succession d’artifices, de mises en scène, de masques la soustrait à l’emprise du rituel, mais pour la livrer aussitôt à une multiplicité, anxiogène, de regards.

Texte de Clara Guislain.
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source: berlinartlink
Donna Huanca is a multi-disciplinary American artist who works nomadically, and has chosen Berlin as her base. Creating artwork with media including performance, installation and sound, she explores cultural hybridity by deconstructing them and recreating her own ceremonies. Materials like discarded clothing and second-hand fabric play a major role in her work. She interplays found objects from material culture which range from diverse fabrics to metals that span from simple nuts and bolts to jewelry and silverware. Her work also includes organic elements such as dirt, smoke, and foods.
Clothing is a critical element in her work, because it represents the diversity and hybridity of culture today. The bright colors of the fabrics are evocative of ethnic clothing, sometimes referencing the tribal clothing of South America or rural Asia. Her portrait ‘paintings’ are made of layered scraps of clothing, fabric, fur or felt. While working, she uses cloth like paint by placing it on the ‘canvas,’ whether that be a human body, a mannequin, or the wall. She controls the movement of the medium, but also lets it fall freely when necessary. In her piece Pachamama “Dressing the Queen” (2009, video) she films herself putting layers upon layers of clothing on a female subject Through this action, she creates a living collage, or as she calls it, an ever changing ICON, which calls upon the idea of cultural ceremony.
As well as using models as elements in her works, she also places a level of importance on collaborative pieces, especially as installations and performance works. In Conjunction (2010 at HBC Berlin), her collaborative piece with Rachel de Joode and performers Helga Wretman and Tallulah Holly-Massey, there is a focus on mixing textural objects in a somewhat contrived but random manner. According to the artists, the “sculptural spectacle” interpreted the relationship between planets as they are seen when they align. Thus Wretman and Holly-Massey visit each “station” to interact with each of the planets, sectioned off by their colours and elements from the mythology surrounding each planet.
In the project Jerusalem 2012 (2007), a collaborative performance piece with AIDS-3D and Wretman, she deals with our anxieties and emotional reactions to social myths. It was based on the collective fear of an apocalypse pertaining to predictions of the Mayan calendar that have been highly transmitted through popular culture in the past decade. In Secret Museum of Mankind (2008) she played upon societies interest in our individual past and future realities. In it Huanca created “[her] own Natural History Museum, which included different ‘memory stations’: that represented [her] genetic past, childhood and future.”
Beginning with her early smaller portraits created from 2004-2006, Huanca has expanded her portrait series to created large mural pieces that reference traditional masterpieces, such as seen in Cuban Rebels (The Last Supper) 1967, 2007 and Calles de Oro (Mar de Crystal), 2006. Unlike the iconic works she references, her pieces always have an underlying political message. Other early works include the Felt Assault Series (2004), which is reminiscent of Alighiero Boetti’s embroidered maps of the world. However, she pushes beyond simply creating felt representations of the world to her creating charted maps of continents known to distribute and freely use weapons to incite free within the public.
Huanca’s mixed medium work ranges in style and arena, with works exhibited in galleries, the street, a shop window and featured in Vogue. Her work is a vehicle for anthropological traces, which relies on a composition of rich and vibrant colors to enliven the history and memories of each presented culture.