Artist's statement'
LiveWire
is about delightful horror.
In evocative works in glass, resin, vinyl, digital prints and
video, Celia de
Villiers takes a look at the
performed body as a site of subjection, agency and identity
politics and investigates the manner in which
contemporary artists challenge
conformity through the use of cross-media and converging
idiosyncrasies. Through her research of Performance art for the
Masters in Fine Arts, De Villiers
has investigated artworks that refer to physical adornment,
masquerade and props as dialogues with self-disclosure and
fetish. She has come to the conclusion that, over the last few
decades, notions of traumatic spectacle and Gothic hybrid have
been revived in artmaking and popular entertainment due to our
preoccupation with the ab-human or post-human. Gothic and
Baroque aesthetics seem to re-emerge cyclically during periods
of cultural stress and mostly communicate anxieties about social
transformations and crises.
