Photo credit David Ashford 

Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, New York

Polyphony and Cacophony: The Morphing Woman, or, How To Explain Myself To A Sculpture

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The Morphing Woman, or, How to Explain Myself to a Sculpture is a site-specific performance conceived for Socrates Sculpture Park by artist Deborah Wasserman.   

 

While our society has historically and culturally positioned the female body as a site of adoration and the male gaze, Wasserman’s performance aims to release its projected, idle and muted passivity into a fluid, ‘active and creative power’, endowed with a ‘voice’, and gaze, while still referencing it as a ‘sculpture’.

 

Moving, crawling stretching and standing still around the park’s site from inside a stretchy, mesh fabric, wearing a bodysuit, Wasserman looks to balance and position her body made silhouettes and shapes against the landscape/horizon line, wired to a pre-recorded soundtrack.

 

Employing words and language/s to respond, in a spontaneous and creative manner to the site and the sculptures on display, she aims to encourage audiences to experience art, poking fun at certain types of art jargon while continuing to embrace the creative process through their bodies.

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