Against Domestication
Sam Conlon & Shia Conlon
Against Domestication is an examination of power structures and how they might oppress a body. In Against Domestication those structures take the shape of gender, sexuality, religion, the family, and the state. In Spectral Evidence Ulrich Baer explores the idea of traumatic experiences registering in and as photographic memories in the mind. Taking this as a departure point, I imagined the project as a form in which to explore the rewriting of trauma.
I wanted to revisit these 'photographic memories' or sites of trauma via restagings. Here the camera is utilized as a form of speech. The resulting image acts as a language to communicate the otherwise ineffable. So often trauma takes away the inability to articulate, and memories become obscured. The act of speaking, making a language, post-trauma, is political.
As Baer say "trauma seems to result from the mind's inability to edit and place an event within a coherent mental, textual, or historical context in ways that would allow it to become part of lived experience and subsequent memory", this remaking via photography shapes a new memory in the psyche, where the subject has autonomy and control and where the power is located back to the body, to do with it what it will.
Shia Conlon is an artist working with photo, film, text and sculpture. Much of their work has been centered around marginalized voices and about growing up in the landscape of working class Catholic Ireland.
Their work has been exhibited in London, New York, Dublin, Helsinki, and Montreal amongst others. Their work has also been written about in The New York Times, i-D, Dazed and Confused and Huffington Post UK and US. They work between Tipperary and Helsinki. They are assistant to Elina Brotherus.
In their past work, Conlon used pop-culture references, utilising the online platform with Bunny - a collective founded by Conlon - as well as producing zines, using these seemingly non-cultural or mass-culture tools to communicate with a wider, contemporary arts audience.