JOUISSANCE BY ABBY WRIGHT

Opening 04.16 from 13-18

frid: 13:00 - 18:00

sat: 12:00 - 16:00

sun 13:00 - 16:00

Jouissance by Abby Wright

My work plays with the failures of anthropomorphic perception to create experimental abstract films and performances by use of different media. The works I have made this year focus on jouissance; beyond the pleasure principle. I think of the Lacanian term of “Encore” to denote a more excessive kind of pleasure and constant need to transgress the limits imposed on enjoyment and to desire beyond the pleasure principle. My aim is to play. To engage the pleasure principle by experimenting with aspects of touch and intimacy. I explore space and the physicality of touch in performance by caressing and exploring space to create a landscape through nontraditional mark-making. I use oil pastels in-between my fingers and toes or paint on my feet. As I do this I think of Georges Bataille’s writings on the big toe as he says it is the most human part of the body. “...with their feet in mud but their heads more or less in light, men obstinately imagine a tide that will permanently elevate them, never to return, into pure space. Human life entails, in fact, the rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse -- a rage that is easily directed against an organ as base as the foot.” (Georges Bataille: Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939)

I have included a few pieces from 2020 that I made throughout the lockdown in this exhibition. The photographs in this exhibition are based on a meditation of the orgasm or eggs, and how an egg is the creation of a new body, a collective experience of an orgasm, and a desert island as a body. The photographs of the empire state building are a juxtaposition from the playful egg. I explore my relationship with capitalism, what the empire state building has meant to me, and being American. The photographs of the Empire State building are a series of photographs I took out the window at my job as a producer when I lived in New York City through 2012-2016. I was looking at the photographs and considering what it means to "caress" capitalism, to long for the american dream, and what it meant to stare at the empire state building out my window for years.

Abby is a post-structuralist multidisciplinary American artist based in Berlin. Before pursuing her Masters in Contemporary Photography; Practices and Philosophies at Central Saint Martins, she previously graduated with a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.