Muscle Display Performance 2

Artist Statement by Becky Boston, UK. Cross-posted at www.beckyboston.com

There are very few people in this world that I (Becky Boston) would ever trust to take a lovely portrait but Emma McGarry (my best buddy) and talented artist is one of them. Here are a few portraits from her new project, all writing below is from Emma’s website, if you want to check out more of Emma’s work please go to www.emmamcgarry.com

Muscle Display Performances 2

Emma McGarry: ‘For this project I have been asking people, independently and in pairs/small groups, to perform simple physical movements. It’s all about observation and control – bodily control, and control in the sense of power. It’s working with ideas of collective movement, moving in sync, and the physical affect of the presence of one body on another.

Muscle Display Performances 2 was preceded by Muscle Display Performances 1, and is part of an ongoing project into muscularity, gender, identity and performance.
I am also one half of artist collaboration KEEM. KEEM was established in 2011 as an exploration into the nature of collaboration. Through methodology, ongoing discussion and debate, KEEM produces work which continuously questions subjectivity, materiality and identity.’

[Photo above: ‘Becky’ and ‘Kate and Becky’ by Emma McGarry, 2013. Photo courtesy of Emma McGarry]

Emma McGarry’s Artist Statement

I am an artist and anthropologist living and working in London. I like to study the memory and legacy of objects, as well as the physical aftermath of social interactions. Combining hints and traces into solid documents, exploring the spaces between things, and narrating the invisible links and networks that surround us, are what interest me most.

Sculptural and performative elements form the basis of my investigations, but there remains a strong bias towards photography in my work. I first began photographing things as a way of capturing, explaining, and exploring ideas from a subjective, embodied perspective. I now use photography as process, outcome, and document.

My interest in material culture, in particular my interest in physicality and form in relation to social context, has developed out of a background in anthropology. I am influenced by contemporary anthropologists like Alfred Gell, Daniel Miller and Bruno Latour. A lot of my work could be seen as an ode to certain trains of thought or ideas formulated within their circles. My interest (to the point of obsession) with material culture is coupled only with an even bigger obsession with the body. And this links back to my connection with photography as an embodied practice; a lived experience as well as a process.

As a result of these two obsessions, my work tends to revolve around the meeting of the animate with the inanimate, the mutable position of subject to object, and artistic production as a fully social and fully physical process.

I am also one half of artist collaboration KEEM. KEEM was established in 2011 as an exploration into the nature of collaboration. Through methodology, ongoing discussion and debate, KEEM produces work which continuously questions subjectivity, materiality and identity.

‘Kate and Becky’ from the art project Muscle Display Performance 2 by Emma McGarry, 2013. Photo courtesy of Emma McGarry.