Diplopic Impositions
Art Research Project 2023
Material: Pen, cartridge paper, digital print, projection, fabric
Diplopia is the medical term for ‘double vision’. My own experience of diplopia after an injury provoked a curiosity about vision, repetition, confusion, abstraction and the distortion of bodily and sensorial experience. My diplopia is laterally displaced.
Through making marks of laterally displaced vertical lines in biro, I render the body into shades of light and dark. Portions of skin, hair and muscle loose their meaning as they are cut up, mirrored, pulled apart and put back together again: the ultimate objectification and clinical curation of the medical body. Patterns are created through repetitive acts creating perfect geometries out of imperfect forms. An act repeated to abstraction takes on new meanings, it becomes habitual, background, decorative.
Projection is a form of ocular imposition.
Projection is defined as the presentation of an image on a surface or an estimate or forecast of a future situation based on a study of present trends. Today the word ‘to project’ might often be used to describe a person, ‘projecting their idealised version of a partner onto another’, a fallacy, an unfair depiction. To project is surface level and yet it describes the possibility of futures.
Diplopic Impositions, uses the method of projection as a way of layering the (aspirationally perfect) bodily acts of repetition onto the habitual and background surfaces of the day-to-day life of the diplopic individual.
The bedroom is the space of rest, of comfort, of relief, of sex, of work, of play, or exercise, of intimacy, of conversation, of art. Diplopia causes confusion, sometimes it is hard to leave the home environment because the outside world is too visually overstimulating. The bedroom is a place of stillness.