The Practice of Disguise: Artists in Conversation with Ling-lin Ku, Ara Oshagan, and Cynthia Madansky

The Practice of Disguise: Artists in Conversation with Ling-lin Ku, Ara Oshagan, and Cynthia Madansky
Related to Ling-lin Ku’s exhibition The Practice of Disguise
An artist conversation shared among LA-based photographer and installation artist Ara Oshagan, New York artist and LA-born filmmaker Cynthia Madansky, and multimedia sculptor Ling-lin Ku exploring the seemingly binary yet in fact the blurry relationship of seeing and not seeing, revealing and concealing through creative approaches, personal experiences, and social-political lenses. Streaming on this page at 12 noon on November 19 and online at Facebook Live (@18thstreetarts).
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ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Seeing and not being seen, revealing and concealing, although at first appear to be binary opposites, are in fact forms of disguise. Using camouflage in the military as a starting point, in the exhibition The Practice of Disguise, Ku works at the intersection of digital camo and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the body without organs. This notion describes contrasting ways of perceiving reality in a state of late capitalism, through a childlike exploration of shifting surfaces and social appearances versus a darker and more primal exploration of the body’s interior life. The horizon of the body without organs is one where the body contains a multivalence of potential traits, connections, affects, and movements that spin out into the virtual realm. Ku’s work explores how our perceptions entangle with our real and potential bodies in a fractured, digitized environment of social representation, surveillance, and desire. Through proximity, scale, texture, material, and hybridization, Ku upends our relationship to what we think we know about our social constructs and our own identities. The work slips in and out of categorizations, proposing new ways in which we come to understand the world.
This exhibition features Ling-lin’s new work created during the residency at 18th Street Art Center, including a multi-channel video and sculptural installation that reflects on the revealing/hidden moments in the intersection of the virtual and tangible world, familiarity and the uncanny, otherness and selfness. In the current age of information, extreme self-exposure, and the constant mediation of fact, Ku explores the ways in which disguise has figured in contemporary art, and our relationship to representation in our modern era.
Find more information here.