Dana Tosic, Everyday Ephemera 3, screenprint, 38”x50”, 2010.
September 15 – October 22, 2011
Open Studio Gallery
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 104
Toronto ON, M5V 3A8
T/F: 416-504-8238
E-mail: sara@openstudio.on.ca
W: http://www.openstudio.on.ca
Focusing on fleeting, intimate, moments, Dana Tosic’s Everyday Ephemera explores notions of time and memory, and the body’s potential to infer a narrative through movement. The series reveals moments in which something is happening, despite initial appearances of nothing going on—the body engages in quotidian and often solitary motions: dressing and undressing, tying shoes, peeling fruit, sewing, knitting, eating. These are learned, automatic movements that often provoke reflection and introspection, allowing the mind to be simultaneously absorbed and disengaged. Although the images reflect intimate moments not intended to be shared, the presentation draws attention to their performative nature.
The screenprinted images are based on composites of a series of 360° 3D scans of the artist’s body performing various tasks. The movements have been broken down into stages of motion; each stage was scanned individually and subsequently combined to form a single image using 3D modeling software. As recordings of the stages of motion, plotting the passage of time through human locomotion, the images function as a digital trace of something that took place during the unspecified past. What is left is a momentary glimpse of where the body was and a suggestion of what it was doing at an unspecified moment in the past. In this way, traces of memories of the body, and the motions it employed, are left on the paper. As pointed out by J. Eric Steenbergen in the accompanying essay, the work also raises questions about surveillance and observation, and how new technologies in these areas affect our self-representation.