LOOKING ‘BACK’

The Body Model was an approximation of a look back by a body unaware, a deliberate dispersal of precision of an eye, a trace of body motion left behind yet recorded. Loosely inspired by the looking back present in the Grande Odalisque by Ingres, Manet’s Breakfast on Grass and Lot’s wife myth, the wearable model attempts to harness the temporality of motion present in the body disturbing the precision of the camera. 

Ingres paints a woman from the back whose elongated spine, with her upper body outgrown the proportion of her lower body, in order to be able to stretch and turn her head so she could look back. Manet’s naked woman, in the company of two dressed men and a woman, who looks back, gazes daringly into the space outside the place where she seemingly belongs. Lot’s Wife, who looked back, became a pillar of salt. This pillar is a cornerstone around which space evolves in all directions – mythically and geographically. 

These, key protagonists of looking back gaze, are displaced, either portrayed as being out of the enclosed world of a harem and given a special position amongst many, or displaced from the fully dressed company of man and another woman, or encroaching into disputable territories from where the space can evolve in various directions. The body model exploits this ambiguity of the location of such gaze – could it be that its location is constantly evolving temporally in space? As the camera is conditioned by the body it’s technically minded lens enters into a borderland where the spatial conditions of an image are unfixed and mutable, evolving the timelines of displacement, fuzzy registrations and uncertain conditions.