Chanielle Segal

Untitled

I see the present period as a modern version of the story of the Tower of Babel: humanity’s attempt to transcend its nature, and the resulting disintegration of the existing order.. The global pandemic brought with it weeks of isolation during which the main method of communication was via screen. Even one who tried to maintain distance from the virtual-social platforms found herself flattened and compressed into the small frame of a screen, wondering if anyone was even looking at her in the digital panopticon. The ability to disconnect from physical constraints and connect to any person or environment with the click of a button, the camera, and the intrusive eye, brought with it a sensory reality of fragmented, broken space with blurred boundaries. This sensory experience, which has become like an internal language to which we have become accustomed, serves as the basis of this work. The video works address two central themes that meet and intersect with each other. The first is different observations of the landscape, and the other is an instrumental use of my character as it manifests in many identities. In the works, I position the characters withindifferent territories in subversive, ironic, and playful ways, testing boundaries between the interior space, exterior space, and the technological space. The intersection of my various incarnations in the changing landscapes produces multidimensional identities, fluctuating on the scale between stratification and flattening.