The Third Body will present new site-oriented works by David McFarlane, Vida Simon and Jane Williams. This exhibition was inspired by my experience of specific works by each artist — works that placed emphasis upon the living body in an ongoing interaction with its environment. These were works through which the viewer became intimately engaged with the artist by way of the glance, as well as localized feelings of touch and movement. With these practices otherness is not only intersubjective, but is also constitutive of an intimate self-reflexivity. Here the concept of reversibility may be an appropriate way of addressing dichotomies such as inside/outside, self/other, presence/absence. Notions such as the “performative self,” “subject-in-process” and “embodied spatiality” come to mind. I am particularly interested in how, through metonymic identification, vestiges of the artwork intervene in daily life, awakening a metaphoric/poetic sense of self.  I believe that each artist, in her or his own ways, question the separation of the visual from the other senses. This line of questioning implicitly points to the cultural construction of identity, especially in relation to the politics of location. With this exhibition I hope to draw attention to the political and therapeutic potential of such artistic practices. I suggest that by extending boundaries of self these works call into question societal maps that define reality.

Jack Stanley