A Conversation with Jessica Borusky
Skulls: Office Work 2012 (video Stills)
Bradley Tsalyuk in collaboration with Maia Dolp hin-Krute
Currently on view at the Paragraph Gallery as a part of Charlotte Street and Urban Culture
Project’s programming is Perma-F(r)ail: Personae Documents an exhibition featuring the
work of Alien Moon Partnership, Robert Chamberlin, Jesse Darling, Bug Davidson, Dell
Hamilton, Sarah Hill, Hisaya Ishill, Leonor Jurado Laspina, Haley Kattner Allen, Judith Levy,
Nabeela Vega, Maggie Cavallo/ YUNG ZILLA, David Wayne Reed, Eduardo Restrepo, David
Richmond, Leah Silvieus, Joanna Tam, Bradley Tsalyuk, and (Wo)manorial. This exhibition
was curated by Charlotte Street Studio Resident, Jessica Borusky.
Alongside the long roster of artists, the show is presented to generate conversation about
the way one presents a persona. Interactive works and the collection of writings by the
artists in the show give the exhibition a perfect entry point to relate to the show’s larger
concepts. Borusky’s involvement within the arts community prompted me to conduct this
interview to gain better insight about this very layered exhibition.
On The Seventh Day 2013 (Video Still)
Judith Levy
Melaney Mitchell: First tell me a bit about the show and your curatorial mission with it?
Jessica Borusky: My aim with Perma-F(r)ail: Personae Documents is to create an
atmosphere of artwork that potentially reflects some of the issues surrounding ideas of
persona, performativity, and identification politics. This atmosphere connects language,
shifting presentations, struggles with visibility/invisibility, ephemeral matter, and mediated
experience. This is all to produce an environment with which the audience can interact with
through listening, reading, watching, and conversing. Beyond that, I also wish to use this
showcase as a platform for uniting live, spatial/temporal artworks nationally alongside
Kansas City artists in order to produce a diverse and exciting critical dialogue.
MM: Something that I think is really exciting about the exhibition is the projects around it.
Can you tell me more about the collection of writings, and the other programming
surrounding the exhibition?
JB: Perma-F(r)ail: Personae Documents will be up at Charlotte St.’s Paragraph Gallery until
May 17 there are two planned evenings of live work: the first will be April 22 at 7pm:
Sarah Hill of Boston and local artist Judith G. Levy will be performing and May 6 at 7pm:
Alien Moon Partnership of New Orleans and Leah Silvieus of New York will perform work
from the show. I will be giving a gallery talk for the Charlotte St. Residency Open Studios
Event on Saturday April 26 at 12pm.
The show will also be traveling to Boston and show at\Howard Art Projects from July 25-
August 15 .
When in Boston, there will also be a gallery talk and live artwork at that iteration of the show.
We also have plans to show work/lecture in New York and Washington DC this summer.
Afterwards, a catalog will be put together based on images from the artwork, gallery
installations, live performance, writing done by the artists, and a critical essay I am writing for the show.
I asked each artist to write something for the show, but for this to not be an artist statement
or explanation of the materials. Instead, I wanted the artists to consider the writing portion to
be an extension of their visual work, of their practice, and to think about writing as another
form of persona-documentation. For, there is a way in which we can express ourselves via
writing that denotes an entirely different object/audience relationship, and can lend way to
intimacies not necessarily explored through visual/audio/live means. Furthermore, I am not
above/outside/beyond this artwork and would never suggest I “interpret” the work in some
translative way. I am simply applying a lens to work that implores an intertexual viewing.
Moreover, I am of the opinion that artists are not incapable of communicating themselves via
text. And, so, for this show, I encouraged textual exploration as supplementary to the
artwork, and not as a definer or decoder of it.
F to (video still) 2013/2014
Sarah Hill and Hayley Morgenstern
MM: I’m interested in how the show’s theme relates to your practice, how do you relate to
persona in your own work?
JB: I utilize persona as a way to discuss my relationship with larger oppressive, systematic
structures that I both take critique of, and inarguably, am entwined within. Persona is not a
character; it is a facet of myself. I also utilize persona as a way to create a humorous entry
point for work that deals with historical and personal trauma dealing with stigma theory,
queer theory, and sexual abuse. To be frank, persona is a big deal in my artistic practice; it
allows much to surface through linguistic and physically activated means.
In creating work that uses persona as artistic material, I often don’t feel at home among other
cultural producers. Of course, I can look to Warhol, Beuys, and Sherman as examples of
myth, characterization within work, but it is not quite the same. Persona is not so readily
used as a way to describe the work, as it the term is tinged with some kind of mark of
inauthenticity. Which is where, within certain kinds of queer art-making, notions of
disidentifying, satire through physical and vocal gesture, and explicit social reflection I felt
more at home. I felt as though I was treading both humorous and sincere waters. The artists
in the show do the same; albeit sometimes reflecting and reenacting those oppressive
structures they wish to make artwork outside of. Making my work requires an attempt to
consider the full picture- problematic as well as progressive; and the show aims to do that as
well.
Moreover, though the very act of archiving the show- via the Paragraph Gallery at the
Charlotte St. Residency, these interviews, people seeing and talking about it, producing a
catalog- I am attempting to connect my work within, beside, and against, the atmosphere
and world of the work within the show. And, in so doing, hoping to secure a kind of artwork
that often gets relegated to other, already prescribed categories. The category of Persona-
Based Artwork reflects many art historical cannons, yet produces a slightly different tone and
shape; one that cannot be easily marked or produced, based on the fact that its central point
is derived from ephemeral experience extrapolated into the temporary space of the art
exhibition.
Visiting Thahab Ongoing Performance Series
Nabeela Vega
MM: What are your thoughts on contemporary identity construction, particularly within the
queer community?
JB: I cannot and will not speak for the “queer community” as some kind of whole. To do so
would belittle the notion that we all have distinctive drives, struggles, and survival strategies.
To generate an answer to this would be to leave certain people and ideas out, in a way that
would be unproductive to the conversation surrounding identification.
I suppose to this question I may ask, instead, how can we (as a culture) begin to consider
the affects of the dominate, omnipresent, hetero-normative agenda, and how this agenda
produces a shameful haze by which we are ALL working to move against/ and out of,
through alternatives that provide a safe and constructive space? Maneuvering through ways
in which we are seen/wish to be seen by way of persona is simply one tactical avenue of
many that ALL of us face: queer identified, or not.
MM: What is the distinction you would make between persona and identity?
JB: Erving Goffman defines performativity in his seminal text The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life as “ all activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by their
continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on
the observers” (p. 22).
Persona is the way in which we perform ourselves conforming (or not) toward a standard or
expectation given to us by a set audience/context or greater social agenda. Persona is often
seen as mask/s we may wear in order to present/isolate particular traits of ours in order to
connect with a person/group/idea. I prefer the term identification to identity as it relates to
larger cultural/historical contexts. Amelia Jones, in her book Seeing Differently, writes that
“because it evokes process and durationality rather than fixed ‘positions’, identification is
preferable to identity as a term for understanding how we negotiate who we think people
are as well as who we imagine ourselves to be” (p. 236) I find this definition useful as it
relates to the ways in which we are constantly shifting ourselves toward one another, as well
as, how we mediate those experiences into cultural production.
Missing 2014
Bug Davidson
MM: Almost all of the works in the show have some sort of digital aspect, do you think that
has an effect on how persona is understood in contemporary life?
JB: I would not consider “digital” as a primary force within the show as much as I would the
term “mediated”. In my opinion, artistic artifact is generated from a physical gesture, a mark
of time/place/performance. How we may choose to connect within a history of artistic
markmaking is always changing and growing. As the subtitle suggests, these are documents.
Moreover, they are documents, which will change once shown in Boston, that will change if
artists choose to write new material for the catalogue. These Documents come in many
forms, however, if we look back at the ways in which Mid-20 Century performance artists
were utilizing evidence or artifact from the initial site of performance, many times a single
object, audio or video recording, or photograph functioned as the traveling object by which
to represent that performative act. When considering the implications of this material- that it
can never be a stand-in for the original work, that, it is in fact another work in and of itself,
these objects of evidence or artifact are both historically marking/archiving the initial
performance, and also failing it.
If we can extrapolate this to the idea of persona- performativity of self/ves then that artifact
becomes further complicated. How would you choose to represent the way you are to your
boss/your lover/someone on the bus/your parents/someone who has wronged you? How
can you possibly reframe that experience in a way that pays both homage to those moments
and also reflects the failure to ever entirely encapsulate that experience? There are aesthetic
choices to be made, surely, many of which are mediated, but- to go into the digital- which is
completely relevant right now given the immediacy and magnitude of “online presence”
within western social aptitude, would be a differently tinged showcase of work. Does this
show conjure up the anxieties we may harbor around digital persona performances and a
relationship to the “real”? Absolutely. But, I think the overall concern around identification is
something that exists within the analog and digital experience.
MM: There’s an interesting binary happening within the exhibition, some works have subtle
sense of humor and others with a completely different sentimentality and seriousness. How
do you feel those two things are guiding the audience?
JB: With this show, I am trying to relay an atmospheric condition about the concepts of
persona, performativity, and identification politics within the mediated, aestheticized frame.
There are myriad avenues by which to observe, connect, and contemplate this material. And,
if we can consider this show to be a small dissection of the infinite possibilities regarding
these concepts, then, there will be a tension between performative/identification strategies
that employ humor, satire, and sincerity. However, this tension, I find, to be a useful and
productive one. It is a tension we all experience when we are faced with the decision of
which self to perform for a particular audience at a particular time. The idea is that our selves
are contradictory, and it is through these contradictions that we begin to unfold complex and
illuminating maps of ourselves, others, and inter-relational navigation techniques.
MM: How do you view your studio practice and curatorial practice? Are they working within
similar questions you have in your studio or are they very separate for you?
JB: I do not see these projects- my studio practice and aesthetic organizational one- as
separate. Instead, I would like to consider myself as someone who aims to generate safe,
critical, and dynamic creative spaces. These spaces can present themselves in the form of
my artwork, or through my organizational projects through Alt. Lecture KC and KCQF
(Kansas City Queer Feminists). When I say I aim to generate these “spaces” I am implying
particular physical/emotional/and intellectual occupancy. I hope that my life/creative practice
endorses this kind of environment for others to engage with. And, in this way, whether I am
making videos in my studio, writing critically, curating an art show, a lecture, or facilitating
discussion(s), I am attempting to create a rigorous queer feminist experience- for myself, and
for those who wish to collaborate with/engage in.
MM: Is this show overlapping with your other projects such as Alt Lecture or KCQF?
JB: Alt. Lecture KC and KCQF (Kansas City Queer Feminist) Collective are ongoing projects
that deal with creatively driven programming ventures that weave between artist talks,
discussion groups, and action projects. These two ventures have events every month. If you
would like to know more about it- they each have a FaceBook page: Alt. Lecture KC:
https://www.facebook.com/alternativelecturekc and KCQF:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/KCQF/450743881694529?ref=br_tf
Pin Drawing 2014
Joanna Tam
Perma-F(r)ail: Personae Documents is open from April 3rdand runs through May 17th 2014.
A performance event featuring Sarah Hill will occur tonight, April 21st at 9pm. Another
performance event Featuring Alien Moon Partnership and Leah Silvieus will take place on
May 6th from 6-9pm. Gallery hours are from 12-5pm Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays
with additional hours from 11-6pm on Thursdays. Paragraph Gallery is located at 23 East
12th Street Kansas City, Missouri