 |
Gallery Exhibitions  Narratives / Blogs |
 |
 |
|
|
|
Erika Gentry | San Francisco, California | artist website In a world that favors codified behavior and neatly organized gender norms, cyberspace seems to be the last frontier where gender renegades, rebels and rogues are allowed to roam free. With the increasing popularity of computer gaming, the boundary between simulacra and reality is tenuous as many individuals find their virtual life more exciting, compelling and fulfilling. This burgeoning virtual landscape is reliant on identities created through text-based programs, thus allows users the freedom to assume identities that may be outlawed in the real world. Cyberspace identities are liberated from restricting social conventions, because through text representations the short can be tall, the plain beautiful and the shy extroverted. Gamers become the author of a new identity, which allows gender outlaws the opportunity to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self. The Oakland-based artist, Erika Gentry is intrigued by new simulated cultures and creates artwork that pushes the boundary between virtual space and reality. In a series of work titled, Simulated Selves, Gentry explores the identity of seven cyberspace characters whose virtual identity morphs into reality. With an identity rooted in text, Gentry examines the conditions of simulated identity by graphically attempting to express its form. Initially the articulation of the characters’ form may seem as if she is imposing social codes and restrictions on an identity that had escaped definition, but Gentry is careful to create an image that enjoys transgression. Residing in cyberspace, Kylariss Sluissi is part snake, part human with no promise of fixing to a single identity. Kylariss Sluissi remains in a constant state of becoming, with a contradictory identity that allows her to traverse boundaries. Thus, as Gentry draws identities out of virtual space and the characters become tangible, they do not conform to predetermined norms, but play on dualisms between human and animal, organism and machine. Gentry has possibly given us the best scenario for the future of post-gender world– the cyborg. A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, and as we witness a world ever more reliant on technology, we are all becoming cyborg. According to Donna Haraway, a cyborg is a creature that is not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.1 In the post-human world, Donna Haraway coins the future of gender as she writes, “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”2 As we increasingly inhabit virtual space and reality simultaneously, outlawed identities of a simulated culture cross into a living culture. Gentry’s second piece, Diableri resides in cyberspace as a French vampire, and became an identity that allowed her originator to exercise a dramatic muscle that she was not allowed to flex in her daily life. As Diableri’s originator role-played, it became tempting to divorce herself from reality as the game gave her control over her own life. She was a partial, temporary identity that vacillated between cyberspace and reality remaining in a constant state of flux. Gentry graphically illustrates the dualism between a lived and virtual reality by making it impossible to focus on a center. Diableri is a decentered subject that is in a constant state of becoming, oscillating between her dual existence. Gentry’s work poignantly shows us that one fixed identity is a drag as the virtual landscape becomes more fulfilling for its daily users and allows identity to be pushed beyond its borders. 1 Donna Haraway, The Haraway Reader. (New York: Routlege, 2004), 13. - by Kristen Raizada
|
