YEAH! CANNIBALISM

Photographs and installation work by Paige Saez, Jason Spieth, and Rebecca Steele

Artist's Reception: THURSDAY, DEC.4, 6-10pm

The work in this show investigates a theory of cannibalism as a process of consumption and reintegration. A form of cannibalism is the ritualistic eating of human flesh by other humans. The person being consumed had power, strength, and skills that are ingested by the cannibal. The individual acquires (or appropriates) the power or symbolic necessity of the other through the process of consumption.

This process is similar to how we look at art and digest meaning. It provides a framework or mechanics for understanding a synthesis of appropriative strategies.Cannibalistic art represents the dissolution of categories, it is instead an index of the un-categorical. This process-driven work seeks to critically engage how appropriation and collection function through building on strategies of gleaning, co-optation, and collaboration. For this exhibit we are presenting work that uses cannibalism as a methodological process. The images are cannibalized from multiple sources, from video games, Youtube videos, and the recreation of existing projects of mimicry and play. The attempt is to combine multiple elements in to one body, in essence to merge.

The ingestion and regurgitation of culture is a fundamental homogenizing process of creative production and provides the conceptual framework for this show.