Galatea
Galatea is a double channel video installation, which was commissioned by Dr. Greg McCartney for the exhibition ‘What Became of The People We Used To Be’ – Tulca Festival of Visual Art, Galway, Ireland, 2012.
Based on the Greek myth of 'Pygmalion and Galatea', I interpreted Pygmalion's literal desire for his sculpture and contemporized the myth by translating the marble carving into the most debased image of the feminine - the sex doll. Alluding to, yet reversing traditional Ophelia imagery, this submerged and lifeless object is sporadically inflated to its anthropomorphic form in an attempt to subvert phallocentric binary oppositions. The installation of Galatea disrupts the filmic technique of ‘suture’, as the shot-reverse-shot technique becomes impossible via the positioning of the two screens, and provides an alternative space, which subverts binary linear narrative. The choppy video editing further fragments and (de)constructs this depicted monstrous 'body', thus endeavoring to create a moment in time whereby life and death becomes simultaneous and liminal.