Abby Wright x Division Review

I play with the failures of anthropomorphic perception to create experimental abstract films and performances by use of different media such as music, sculpture, painting, and text. Utilising the philosophy of entanglement as espoused by Karen Barad, and Donna Haraway's The Companion Species Manifesto, I aim to challenge the oppressive forces of capitalism through collaboration and using only recycled materials to make work. I believe that the world can be understood as one body inhabiting a multiplicity of meanings and realities.

My work interrogates characters we play for other people and ultimately how I as an artist perform. I explore the performance of painting, mark making techniques, and sculpture as one of many characters for a photograph.

The work I have made this year focuses on jouissance; beyond the pleasure principle. I think of the Lacanian term of the “Encore” to denote a more excessive kind of pleasure and constant need to transgress the limits imposed on enjoyment and to desire beyond the pleasure principle. My aim is to play. To engage the pleasure principle by experimenting with aspects of touch and intimacy. I explore space and the physicality of touch in performance by caressing and exploring space to create a landscape through nontraditional mark-making. I use oil pastels in-between my fingers and toes or paint on my feet. As I do this I think of Georges Bataille's writings on the big toe as he says it is the most human part of the body. “…with their feet in mud but their heads more or less in light, men obstinately imagine a tide that will permanently elevate them, never to return, into pure space. Human life entails, in fact, the rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse—a rage that is easily directed against an organ as base as the foot.” (Georges Bataille: Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, )

Abby is a post-structuralist multidisciplinary American artist based