As users constantly reshape the internet, can we simultaneously expand notions of gender and normative modes of identity? My sculptural and digital works explore the interactions between technology and body. To embrace and accept technology as an extension of our existence is to acknowledge the cyborg. First dates became dating apps, quality time became FaceTime, Zoom calls replaced meetings, and Snapping means staying in touch. Surveillance, being presumably omnipresent at this point, intrudes on our autonomy, cataloging into datasets to better sell us the next anxiety medicine or therapeutic massager. The internet’s role in shaping and disseminating identity affects the body in precarious, exploitive, and subtle ways that repetitively manipulate its form. As users, we are both responsible for the existence of the internet and the possibilities of its future.
The adolescent experience of “becoming a woman” teaches us how to perform in our bodies in our environment, but what does the process “unbecoming” look like? Growing up in the conservative south, I experienced rigid notions of gender and sexuality. Through my work I attempt to break down these ideologies to extend the boundaries of what it means to occupy a prelabeled body and to perform within it. So, staging a new performance, my work breaks the prescribed objectives for the body, stretching it beyond its previously designated spaces. My practice investigates the screen as an apparatus for allowing and denying visibility through exposure, overexposure, or no exposure at all. With dominance over our media, the internet reinforces what society pushes to be normalized. Breaking free of oppositional binaries and in alliance with technology, we can reject polarity.
In my installations, cast fragments of the human body are stretched across space and claw through digital screens. Navigating the post-human body, I explore how we construct ourselves to perform in the world with technology. The work visualizes laborious acts of rebellion of bodies in digital spaces as they are entangled with consumer capitalism. Synthetic materials, mass produced objects, and animal bones conglomerate as variable cyborgs. Sometimes sensual, sometimes violent, I navigate the sea of bio-tracking, crypto-consumerist, and hypersexual manifestations of the digital self to envision a space that transcends societal norms.
BIO
Maggie Genoble (b. 2001, Jonesville, South Carolina) is an interdisciplinary artist working within feminist and queer studies as it relates to the emergence of new technology. She works across a range of media, utilizing sculpture, video, and installation to generate hybrid figures in a time when the human body is highly digitized and politicized. Growing up in the conservative American South, she responds to rigid, normative performances of gender and sexuality, working through nontraditional modes of representation in her practice to expand on ideas of identity. Genoble recently completed a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art and Art History from Wofford College (Spartanburg, SC), where she received the Whetsell Fellowship, leading to a solo exhibition. She was the inaugural artist in residence at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville, selected as a Tri State Sculpture Association Memorial Fellow, and received grants from the South Carolina Arts Commission and the Foundation of Contemporary Arts.