vault, the sky is taught by falling, an ongoing series of video works
Karen Bosy
Project overview —

 

 

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How can my research live in different contexts? To negotiate this question, I scatter provocations in the form of short texts, photographs and videos to online spaces. By dispersing my work to the attention of different groups of people, I benefit from divergent interpretations in the form of feedback and insight bringing into view digital media’s long reach and the unsettling, unfixed, dispersed nature of site.

 

Biography

When I was a child, my family moved from Toronto, a city in the middle of a continent to a rural island in the Caribbean Sea. Although I was young, this move away from extended family and a place I understood as my world, brought into view for me the constructedness of my reality. As James Lingwood explains: ‘we learn to interpret the conversations associated with photography, cinema, painting, street signs and so on,’ and our knowledge of these systems ’lead us to believe that the world is a fixed and orderly place’ (Lingwood quoted in Kester, Rachel Whitread’s House, 1995). Lingwood’s comment corresponds to an early impression of my new home where, mixed in with my astonishment at the clichéd truth of the velvety heat of the scented tropical air, was my awareness of the unfamiliar design of street lighting.

As a result of this move, my understanding of television also changed. What had been for me a remotely controlled, public form of entertainment became a tool for communication within the community. My mother’s informational puppet show, she was in public health then, was broadcast daily. The puppets could be found in the opening time slot on the sole TV channel of this island, broadcast during after school hours. In contrast with this experience of the image as a productive space, later my school selected me and other girls to play the pirates for a commercial promoting Birds Eye ready-made food for children, which was also broadcast in the UK. This experience highlighted for me the role of landscape within the potential of moving image.

Subsequently back in Toronto, I studied painting at OCA(DU) and then printmaking and painting at The Slade School of Fine Art. Currently I move between London and Toronto; my work is held at the Eagle Gallery. As a PhD candidate at RCA, I am considering the unfixed nature of site and conversations associated with media in the context of dispersal and critical-documentartist art practice. My main field of reference is experimental (structural) film. I use video and other media within my practice-based research. My paper on the subject of the monument in art practice and daydreaming is relevant here and can be found at https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/444. Links to my published writing can also be found on Instagram @kmbosy and my blog: www.kmbosy.com/blog.