deep tissue / thesis exhibition / winter 2018/19
do physical states influence mental states? do mental states influence physical states? how much does mental illness/unwellness affect the body? and how much do physical injury & illness affect the mind? these are questions i began pondering after confronting four years worth of repressed trauma from an abusive relationship
i had a scary bike accident in january 2018, leaving me with five serious injuries in my right arm and an appointment for a long reconstructive surgery three days later. i never understood the fragility of my body until this experience. and only throughout the arduous recovery process was i able to recognize and fathom the fact that i was in a toxic, abusive relationship. i gained self-confidence, strength, and most importantly agency after having to regain the entire movement of my right arm through months of a terribly painful and debilitating recovery process, and i started to remember repressed emotional, sexual, and physical trauma that i had never apprehended in the four years of being in a relationship with this person. i thank my body for finally helping me understand. thank you body for healing my broken elements.
judith butler says that one “...breaks from the terms of someone’s interpellation that institutes one’s ‘non-being’ in order to break into the category of ‘the human’...” there was a confusion between my external and my internal due to such a driving force being impressed into my body. everything he said, was. everything i was to him, became. his control over my reality left me feeling empty, powerless, and without a self.
i started to do some research and found that pain is stored in the body and trauma is stored in the body too. this research was concrete when my feelings weren’t.
this work is a dedication to my body, is for my body, for the preservation of the self, the protection of the self, and the expression of the self. i studied the way my body reacts to pain, discomfort, exertion, atrophy and the methods it takes to communicate these struggles to my mind. “i for some reason was unable to process and act upon the horrible ways my body was feeling due to this person’s actions…my senses touch see smell hear taste were truer than my judgment…they were trying to tell me something the whole entire time…my mind finally started to catch on…i’m sorry i didn’t listen, body; i’m sorry i put you through so much...”
recovering repressed traumatic memories is an extremely cathartic process but overflowed me with emotions so intense and debilitating which i didn’t know how to absorb and control. a big question i was confronted with inside of me was, “how could i let all of this happen? how could i have let him treat my body this way for so long? how could my conscious mind have been so unaware?” this work is an attempt to try to figure out the answers to these questions.
deep tissue is an investigation into the path that sensory input takes in order to turn into comprehension in the mind and then into motor output, and the ways in which this path could have been disrupted or distorted in my own experience.
this project (and starting to do research about my body in general) makes space for me to conceptually contextualize what was happening inside of my body during all of this, and to push my healing experience forward. for example, i read a lot about body memory, sensation and perception, the mind-body problem, and influences that may affect my brain's ability to interpret sensory information. i also identified specific organs and parts of the body where traumatic memories can be stored or suppressed in order to better comprehend why i was unaware of terrible things he was doing to my body. i thought a lot about storage and metabolization of energy/trauma/feelings in my body. did this abysmal pain take place in my brain or in my sensory organs? and why couldn’t i feel it? every time he violated me, was the experiential sensory information lost somewhere along the way? stored somewhere in my body?
these thoughts then began to take physical form, and i conceived of their representational materials in an installation setting. i explored agentic materials and their limitations/boundaries in order to ponder agency and limitations in my own body. in this gallery, i set up projectors shooting videos through reflective materials such as mylar and semi-transparent materials such as glass and water, which distort the videos (while reflecting and refracting light all over the room) in order to represent the distortions that were happening inside my body. the refracting devices are on constantly spinning turntables, which creates a fluid movement all around the room. like these lights bouncing all over the room, it’s almost as if all these feelings were bouncing all around my body, looking for the right pathways, trying to find my brain, to warn me. i describe the installation of deep tissue as a conceptual representation of the inside of my body, in a sense.
another element in the gallery is my voice: two audio sources, one speaker in each corner of the room. they each play (the same) 45 minute loop. the loop is not synchronized, so the audio will overlap at different parts each loop. i recorded myself for 45 minutes speaking a compiled collection of my writings from the last year: a mix of poems, definitions of words, inspiring quotes, as well anatomical research, philosophical research, and facts about my body. i distorted my voice, so the audio sounds as if it’s coming from inside one’s body, or the ever-conflicting ‘voices in your head.’ a sort of brain-contemplation-conversation.
the last element in the gallery, arguably the most important for me, is a subwoofer playing a sin-wave so low that it is unable to be heard by a camera, and sometimes not even by human ears. the tone is so deep, that it literally imbues a vibration into one’s body when they walk into the room. because the sin-wave is too deep and heavy to hear with one’s ears, this low sound transcends any sense, directly permeating a feeling into one’s body, grounding the body in the space as well as anchoring every other element of the gallery together. a primal understanding of inner thoughts. sensory absorption on a cellular level. the subwoofer acts as a foundational stability, a grounding agent for the chaotic structure of the space, enveloping and encapsulating the viewer.
deep tissue serves as an archive/evidence of my attempt at ‘bettering’ / reaching a state of comprehension. author john dos passos says that “apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or complicated to cope with. the cure for apathy is comprehension.” i became interested in the relationship between atrophy and apathy : the way the deteriorating muscles and bones in my arm affected the way i felt mentally.
the subject of this work is the response. not only a solution but a question as well. deep tissue is about healing, about remedy, about alleviation and endurance. i include and visualize earthly elements such as water, fire, and steam, that all play a very important part in my healing process.
i had issues coming to terms with the fact that the deadline for my thesis installation was not equivalent to the deadline of my healing process, and that i had to separate the two entirely. i think of deep tissue as a check-point or a step in my healing process, rather than any sort of final conclusion. this work gives these all of these feelings ground, a place to take up space, after never having it for so long.
trigger warning please be aware that you may encounter mention of the following while watching the video documentation of this piece: physical abuse, emotional abuse, eating disorders, medical trauma, self harm, sexual abuse, r*ape