Zeezy Powers
March 31 - April 28, 2012

Anxiety? Depression? Anger? Conflict? Indecision? Malaise? Narcissism? Insecurity? Boredom? No drugs. No religion. Just television.

In Subjects, a new piece by Zeesy Powers, the artist continues her irreverent exploration into the mechanics of interpersonal relationships. In Powers’ previous works she has delved into the often unstated frameworks within which our relations operate, publishing somewhat fatalistic rules for relationships, offering to be anyone’s girlfriend for three minutes and later, accepting applications for a one month intimate relationship. Powers’ overt and hyper-aware restructuring of these relationships speaks to the extent to which their frameworks are so often understated.

In this piece Powers transforms Whippersnapper Gallery’s street level gallery space into a street level doctor’s office where she will administer her own brand of amateur therapy to willing participants in front of a camera crew. The raw material sourced from these DIY psychoanalysis sessions will be compiled into a reality-tv series, edited and broadcast online. Each patient must themselves comes to terms with the possibility of misrepresentation and manipulation in the broadcast version of their session.

Subjects is an attempt to confront the competing parallels of our experiences in the world. On the one hand, we exist viscerally, experiencing pain and distress, happiness and elation; reaching out for others. Counter to this, we consume narrative products, invest heavily in the lives of celebrities and follow the faux-participatory arcs of reality television; a kind of narcissistic introspection. These two dimensions of our experience coalesce in Subjects, inviting the vulnerability of the patients while simultaneously exposing the process that creates entertainment from their experiences.

Is your real life a thinly veiled representation of your facebook profile?

In Subjects, Zeesy Powers creates multiple sieves through witch the mechanics of precarious relationships must travel. Initially the situation is constructed to offer a sincere and empathic ear to another human, listening and working through potentially distressing and profound issues of a personal nature. This experience, however, is immediately mediated by a sieve that clearly conveys the doctoral authority of traditional psychoanalysis through her set constructions and the structuring of the power relationship. These conditions of the relationship are simultaneously and dynamically pushing and pulling at one another, pitting the sincerity of the experience against the dogma of an antiquated, though powerful positioning of doctor / patient. Finally, with her trademark tongue-in-cheek cynicism, Powers pulls the whole situation back over itself, mashing it through the lens of reality television. In this final performative act (though not the final participatory act, this comes later through the viewing and broadcast), Powers is able to connote the narcissism and vanity of the exercise, trivializing it and firmly declaring the last word; that of the editor.

It is within this layered framework that Subjects aims to engage the very real concerns brought forward in relational and participatory practices, while addressing the means through which our ability to relate to these personal narrative arcs is co-opted by cultural mediums like reality-tv. As if on a repeating loop, Subjectsunapologetically requests participation, apparently dislodging the audience’s typical experiences with passive spectatorship – only to formalize their participation for spectator consumption.

Though interested in the potentially strange, harsh or difficult relationships fostered over the course of her amateur therapy sessions, Powers ultimately takes those experiences and curves them back on themselves by filming the sessions and broadcasting them weekly on her website subjectsrealitytelevision.com

Subjects strikes participants with a potentially sharp point, asking the patients to give to her their problems, their insecurities, their dissatisfactions all the while in full view of her camera crew and even the public. Subjects traces the path from the emergence of psychoanalysis to our current obsession with reality tv, a medium within which we are able to live out another’s emotional arcs; to find drama and distress with guaranteed conclusion.

a situation that is both a celebratory and sincere dive into potentially profound inter human relationships,