ARTIST

 

Debra Yelva Dedyluk

Title: Containment/ Embodiment

Installation

 

The thesis exhibition, is an installation incorporating three individual bodies of works entitled Homebound: the Bed II, Sorting of the Cloth and Ascension.  My final research incorporates distinct environments and characterizations that consist of layers of shrouded images employing printmaking techniques and video projections onto the surface of objects.  The work reveals traditional printmaking and ceramic vessels as a tactile, hands-on approach to crafting material objects in contrast to the qualities of video that abandons the corporeal object.  Furthermore, the video projection is addressed as a temporal form of printmaking. 

 

Sorting of the Cloth

Video projection onto paper floating on water 

 

The ephemeral quality of the video projections indexes the intangibility of memory.  As seen in Sorting of the Cloth (2002-03), these projected memories are contained within the vessel of a trough, a metaphor for the reflection upon emotional experiences.  The vessel is situated in the interior confinements of the room, a private contemplative space to expose images of personal history.  As seen in Sorting of the Cloth, the portrayal of storage of memories signifies a personal archive.  Memory is both lucid and obscure.  Sorting of the Cloth, a video installation, articulates a relationship between the past and the present.  The imagery focuses on the identification of the emotional and physical containment of memories within one's body that creates one’s identity.  The ephemeral quality of the video projections indicates the intangibility of memory by mimicking how the images move in and out of our consciousness.  In Sorting of the Cloth the projections evoke memories or historical pictorial moments that are contained within the vessel of a trough, a metaphor for our reflection on the embodiment of emotional experiences.  These historical pictorial moments are abstracted from old home movies that were captured by my mother and father.  The images are then overlaid on a still image of a body to note an injury in that particular area, which is based on the theory that the body holds an emotional memory to a tramatic experience.   

 

Homebound: the Bed II

Seven screen-printed sheets with light box 2002-2003

 

The effects of illness are often disregarded by the healthy attributing to the reality of masking such conditions.  Further, it is questionable if a metaphorical description of an illness is a means to romanticize the condition, a contribution to once more mask the illness.  Alternatively, many believe the use of metaphor and imaging, are a positive means to gain a renewed sense of health through unleashing the mind’s healing power.  Chronic illness is cyclical having long lasting effects with no resolution. When a person is confined to the home, objects and actions within this environment take on a greater significance.  The bed, the chair, and the bowl become metaphors for physical states of sleeping, resting, and eating. The bed has many connotations as a place for rest or a place for sex.  The twin bed represents childhood, adult singularity or a hospital bed.  We spend half of our lives in it.  Imagine spending a year in bed.  Your world becomes self-contained, focusing very much on internal experience of memory, analysis and fantasy.  Then, as it is not normal to spend all day in bed, imagine being tested, searched and probed both physically and physiologically.  The bed suddenly becomes a place for the sick.  Homebound: the Bed II sits isolated in the room.  Upon the bed are seven layers of sheets that when peeled back individually inform the viewer of a particular experience through images and text.  It is like a book containing an abstract narrative of a particular chronic illness.  The piece requires viewer involvement while some find it uncomfortable to unmake and remake someone else’s ‘bed’.  The images were stills taken from the video piece and include screened images of medical diagrams as well as actual photos of medical testing.  Sections of text are used to inform the viewer through references to portions of the illness.  Homebound: the Bed II uses a didactic approach in order to give strong indicators (through the clips of information of the illness) on the sheets as a means of providing explanation to the viewer as well as creating a psychological impact of the experience.