Photo by Adolphe Pierre-Louis
Charlotte Thurman & Tara Booth
Maple Street Dance Studio, 3215 Central Ave NE
“Distortion in Scale” investigates the undeniably alien quality of our own physical bodies, as well as the beautiful and strange occurrence that we each have a body. Touch is a form of power—on a spectrum with pleasure on one end and an extreme violation on the other—including their telescoping interdependence with one another. The piece’s rules of display demarcate an untouchable space of intimate interiority, physically removing the viewer’s ability to interact with the art objects outside of the mind’s eye.
The slow obliteration of our physical realities into that of a digital space threatens our inviolable rights to our own bodily experiences within the world. The current effects of the global pandemic as well as blatant systemic violence towards vulnerable communities further contextualizes a future need for the bodily awareness of ourselves and that of others. We cannot afford for our most valuable commonality to remain a liability for only some and a sanctified space for others.
We envision a future in which humans can reclaim the most intimate of their interior and exterior experience, that of their bodies. We embrace the unrecognizable, the grotesque, the complicated, the squishy, the delicate. In our future, the body is not treated as an ungainly artifact, but a locus of unexplored terrain. We’ve put the archaic maps and charts in a drawer. Or rather, we dust off the old map and fold it into a fan. We find new ways to appreciate and value our world and each other.
