Canada
https://seamline.blogspot.com/
Julianna Barabas is a performance and video artist based in western Canada. Her work explores embodied experiences of gender, identity and spirituality, as informed by feminist concerns and theory. A central theme in her work is the dynamic of exchange between performer and audience and the politics of care and attention it implies. Recent works include: Gorilla Jane, a feminist tour of the exhibition PAINT at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2006), Antidote, a ritual hand washing first shown at Latitude 53 Visual Contemporary Culture as part of Visualeyez, then again at the ‘Bathhouse’ as part of Exposure Festival (2008), and Reframed Refrain, a live nude interaction and extension of the Alberta Art Gallery’s Leaving Olympia exhibition detailing the use of the nude in contemporary art.
Her video works have been shown at the Victoria International Film Festival and Out on Screen Queer Film and Video Festival in Vancouver. Her most extensive project is an ongoing performance called ‘seamline’. Beginning in May of 2003, she invited audiences to witness her process of having a line tattooed around the full lateral circumference of her body. These public events continued once a month for a year, evolving into a truly contemporary ritual. Since the physical completion of the work, Barabas has positioned the ongoing conversations that result from living with a full body tattoo as a life time performance, cataloguing the interactions which will be released in an exhibition catalogue/artist’s book in 2010. Barabas received a Bachelor of Political Science from the University of Western Ontario in 1991 and Bachelor of Media Arts from Emily Carr Institute in 2006.
© Juliana Barabas, Antidote, 2011. Photo Henry Chan.
