Plexiglass, light, vinyl, tape

“Forced Perspective” is an installation that takes up the trope of the cowboy popularized through motion pictures and advertising as a one-dimensional fiction. The figure of the cowboy is flattened, multiplied and distorted through the inclusion of multiple shadows and props that extend the form to create a kind of camouflage pattern. An overlaid grid is included in the installation to gesture toward the virtuality of images as abstracted forms, and their part in our constructions of reality. Through methods of abstraction, the work speaks to the nature of images as surfaces encoded with cultural significance, where the grid and the rectangle are paradigmatic forms of our visual culture. Here, I am instead using the grid to obscure the image while drawing the viewer in through the use of light.

“I am an interdisciplinary artist working with both still and moving images, performance and material substrates in contrast with figurative and abstract depiction. My practice is guided by sense modalities of seeing and feeling, exploring touch and embodiment through media and somatic practice. The work grows out of provisional gestures, and is developed through actions like mimicking, mirroring, copying, layering, staging and framing. The outcomes range between different formats and mediums, from online, installation and screen-space, to site-specific encounters and live performances in public spaces. Improvisation is at the heart of both my performance practice and my object-based work, as found objects and found scenarios are both a kind of détournement. Currently, I am interested in the mythology of the American West as it has been disseminated and enacted through Westerns and landscape photography, as well as the relationship between the Western desert landscape and the aesthetics of virtual reality. I write about the intersection of embodiment, technology and philosophy in contemporary art practice, including my own.” - Agnese Cebere