Karen Bosy
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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 and insights bringing into view digital media’s long reach and the unsettled, unfixed, dispersed nature of site.
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 Whiteread’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 OCAD and then printmaking and painting at The Slade School of Fine Art. Currently I move between London and Toronto; my work has been held at the Eagle Gallery, Emma Hill Fine Art for many years. As a PhD candidate at RCA, I am considering the dispersed nature of site and conversations associated with media. My main field of reference is experimental film and I use photography, drawing and other media in my video installation practice and my practice-based research. My proposed submission date is Sept 2024. My thesis title is Inside here: dispersal as a strategy in landscape-based critical-documentarist art practice
vault, on-going series of works can be found on itinerant space, Issue 1: Pilot Issue, keyword dispersal.
@kmbosy, www.kmbosy.com/blog.
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