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Gallery Exhibitions  Narratives / Blogs |
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Sascha Perfect | Dublin, Ireland “Gender is typically thought of as a cultural construct. As such, gender is created through enactment; it is played out on the surface of the body as well as through coded actions. Because gender is outside the body, it remains fluid, changeable.”1 Becoming Man by Dublin-based artist, Sascha Perfect is a corporeal project sustained through a performative act, which questions whether her body can be transformed into another gender. Perfect questions whether or not her physiology can become male, and in her video performance, she asks: where does the masculine body begin within the female body? What is the masculine body? These questions resonate within an exhibition that examines how we “do” or “undo” gender as well as exploring gender as a performance. The success of this work by Perfect is the creation of the illusion of becoming man through a performative act in this six minute and fifty one second video clip. We see how she wills another physicality to enter her body. The subtle yet purposely slow movement of the body as it begins to will itself into man is mesmerizing as her performance draws the viewer in so that he or she pays close attention to the change in each part of Perfect’s body: the smaller stomach; the absence of a womb, a flat chest, the broadness of the shoulders, the stance with feet spread slightly apart, and the protruding chest. All combine into a male presence as we watch over Perfect’s shoulder as she watches her own transformation in the mirror. As the artist experiences the performance, she is amazed at what she sees. “Watching in the mirror I saw myself as a man. This realization, that my body can be perceived as masculine was unsettling. By assessing myself in front of the mirror, am I in a constant process of assuring my feminine body exists? If I can transform my body into a more masculine body, is my femininity just an image constructed by society and myself.” Becoming Man isn’t the end result, it’s more about “becoming” than arriving at a fixed state of being. It’s the subtle movements that manipulate our read of the body and launch it across the usual boundaries of a gendered body. 1 Wilson, Cynthia, Gender as Performance in the Work of Nan Goldin. - by Tina Johnson
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