Exhibition
Seducing The Machine - University For The Creative Arts
Seducing the Machine, an exhibition of digital video and photographic work, marks the culmination of Katherine Nolan's doctoral research into narcissism, performance and contemporary feminist practice.
The inwardly looking self-indulgent love of narcissism seems incongruous with contemporary art as a critical practice, and yet it is an unspoken impulse and motivation fundamental to the artist's making of work. This is doubly problematic for the female practitioner as narcissism is commonly attributed to women through a normative concept of femininity as decorative, preening and conceited, which in turn asserts a ‘trivial’ and ‘frivolous’ fixation with her own image.
Critically addressing different modalities of feminine narcissism as autoerotic self-reflexivity, vanity, masquerade, attention seeking hysteria and exhibitionism, Nolan proposes that through a method of Seducing the Machine latent narcissism is pushed to the surface and becomes unravelled. In the work, techniques of a physical, emotional and diegetic relation to apparatuses of image production and consumption produce narcissism as not simply a tautological relationship to the self, but a complex set of exchanges between the camera/viewer/self. Thus the work unpacks narcissism, exposing it as cultural discourse and harnessing the potency of its problematic self-absorption as
artistic concern.
