Jenn Norton: The Insatiable Appetite of Russian Dolls
September 5 to 30, 2007
Guelph based integrated media artist Jenn Norton uses and subverts the conventional devices popularized in mainstream North American media, incorporating video, animation, performance, and set design. For Norton, the distinctions of corporation and individual, producer and consumer, performer and audience are blurred. In her work, the viewer and the performer share the same stage, where the medium and its message are elastic. Here, fiction and truth within video and digital technologies are interchangeable, but no less believable or “real.”
Norton’s exhibition, The Insatiable Appetite of Russian Dolls, featured Transfer Station, a single channel animation/video hybrid, and Les Poupées Russes, a two-channel video installation. Transfer Station reveals the illusion of its medium. Norton writes, casts, directs, and records extended narratives that she seamlessly presents as re-purposed “commercial” media via the most popular of all domestic appliances: the television. Importantly, Norton has constructed Transfer Station entirely from scratch; it only resembles appropriated footage, wherein the (dis)illusion lies. For Les Poupées Russes, Norton utilized the properties of mise en abyme. One side of the dual projection depicts the viewpoint of the camera (what is being recorded) and the other side depicts the camera-as-object and the camera-person (what the subject sees), simultaneously collapsing and refracting the image and its meaning. Norton occupies both perspectives as subject and camera-operator. With Transfer Station and Les Poupées Russes, Norton traverses “real” and “simulated” space, making the realm of possibility impossible and the familiar strange.
In addition to her work in the visual arts, Norton has performed as a stilt walker, a clown, and a face painter in a Toronto-based circus, and in an outdoor theatre troupe. Her experiences in theatrical spectacles inform her art practice, a process that is particularly evident in the current exhibition.
Norton completed her undergraduate degree at the Ontario College of Art & Design (Toronto).
The exhibition, The Insatiable Appetite of Russian Dolls, marks the culmination of Norton’s Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Guelph, after which she will embark on a seven-month road trip to the Yukon where she will participate in an artist residency.
Artist’s Talk with Jenn Norton
Tuesday, September 25 at noon
Images:
Top: Transfer Station, 2007 (video still)
Centre left: Transfer Station, 2007 (video still)
Centre right: Les Poupées Russes, 2007 (video still)