Leah Aron (New York, USA): Long Durational Upskirt
- Duration: 120 min
- Watch: 3rd December 2017 at 9pm
DESCRIPTION: The innocuous act of walking around New York City- and the resulting imagery of the female anatomy (moving ass and thighs), is compelling and potent enough imagery that it can compete with hardcore pornography for views online. Concept: Challenging its pornographic context, perpetuating the “upskirt” view and extending the duration from the average still photo or 2-3 minute video clip to several hours. I will create a live “upskirt” video by fixing my phone to the top of my shoe facing up, and walking around the city where I live. Women often have to cope with certain feelings (exposure, embarrassment?) when they are walking in a skirt. Additionally, others- mainly men, have cared enough to make the view up a woman’s skirt into a genre of softcore porn. The upskirt has been universally fetishized, as evidenced by the thousands of websites and blogs dedicated to posed as well as secretly stolen images of women and girls. This performance implicates the viewer by forcing and/or giving permission to look, virtually and online, for a longer period of time at what they would normally sneak a peek at or avert their eyes to in public.
BIO: Leah Aron is a New York-based performance artist interested in methods and aesthetics that are not traditionally associated with standards of perfection. The calamity of being female saturates her work. Her main goal in performance is “to achieve altered states of consciousness, exploring the polarity of embodied experience from exhaustion to exhilaration, pain to pleasure.” Aron’s body is her medium, often working with duration, repetition, movement, and stillness. She has worked closely with Karen Finley, Linda Montano, and Marina Abramovic. Finding inspiration in her self-described surreal perception of moving through the world, she stages acts of desire and repulsion that unmask the power and trauma of female identity. ARTIST WEBSITE