Jessica Arseneau

28.02.2020 - 19.3.2020

The Screen Under My Eyelids

The Screen Under My Eyelids brings together works that explore the mental and social states of insomnia. Conceived with digital video, audio and inkjet prints, the exhibition investigates a temporal form between standstill and movement. The works echo the continuous shape of time in an insomniac condition, as well as a world in a perpetual functionality. Light in this sense has become an aesthetic vector for mechanisms that structure contemporary society. Activities can be performed around the clock. Meanwhile, the definite lines between work and rest, sleep and wakefulness dissolve. One of the works shown in the exhibition is a video that projects images of a mirror satellite that has the function of deflecting the sunlight towards the Earth. It evokes the ambiguous desire to extend the diurnal temporality to a sempiternal day.

Jessica Arseneau works with time-based media such as performance, lecture and video, where she seeks to expand the notion of ‘tableau vivant’ as unfolding in sequences of various moving or still images. Her research revolves around systems of representation and what governs them, interacting with human activity and inactivity.