Cite/Site/Sight


A four legged table with a circular top and circular book stands in front of a wall featuring projected text.

Installation view of Cite/Sight/Site at UW Madison, 2018


Overview

Through the use of spatial relationships, video, coding, writing, and bookbinding, this art installation places the viewer at the center of a node, a point of convergence that examines the variety of peoples and organizations who use/embody/manipulate the term transgender and to what effect. By placing various sources and voices in conversation with one another, the work examines whether any word that seeks to define or describe non-binary gendered embodiment can ever really do that or if it instead always fails to contain/apprehend all of it’s own iterations, implications, and complications.

In creating these works with a nonlinear structure in mind, the viewer’s conventional modes of processing of image and text into understandable and digestible narratives are undercut. Placing the viewer in this state allows for the multidirectional tensions of the various photo, video, audio, and textual elements and their juxtapositions to be considered without a predeterminable resolution. This system does not inherently construct or destruct meaning but rather gives meaningful elements over to a system that may alter meanings based on how they are understood in context.

It is primarily work that is about seeing and being seen as non-passive acts, about teasing out the violence inherent in systemic and dehumanizing methods of categorizations, about empathizing and dissociation, about the thresholds and portals between things, and about the bodies (mine) that are caught amongst it all.



Links

Video Documentation:
https://vimeo.com/showcase/8992190

Wall Text Code Repository:
https://github.com/cthompto/cite-sight-site



Additional Documentation

Circular non-linear artist book with flesh imagery on a wooden table.

Detail of Cite/Sight/Site artist book at UW Madison, 2018

Installation image of Cite/Site/Sight featuring a projected image of a nude back.

Installation of Cite/Sight/Site video at UW Madison, 2018




For additional documentation and/or information about this project, please feel free to contact me at:
[email protected]