Assume the position : play's mediation of institutional anxiety

Abstract

Assume the Position uses visual art’s flexible methodologies to consider the complex structural, affective, socioeconomic, and spatial relations between visual artists and the cultural institutions with which they are imbricated. Adopting a transdisciplinary approach that draws from visual art, cultural studies, and sociology, my practice-based research explores anxiety as a physical and temporal approach, as well as a significant relation-to-objects under neoliberalism. Materially diverse projects privilege playful approaches and new attitudes toward temporality as strategies for mediating these contemporary affects. Projects cohere by their strategic complication of vision and time, privileging the local, and emphasizing approachability by engaging humour, play, and the saturated, visual language of childhood.