Jesse Darlin'
Bereich: Konzeptkunst / Kritik
Key Facts
Nationalität
Großbritannien, NiederlandeBereich
Konzeptkunst / KritikWohnort
LondonEmpfehlende Institution
monochromZeitraum
Mai 2008 - Juni 2008Jesse Darlin’ was raised partially in Oxford, England, and partially in the back of her parents’ bus. Since childhood she has been interested in the practice of “active experimental living” as research – the exploration of artifice vs authenticity – and the use of the technological metaphor to explain the human condition. As a child she taught herself P-basic in order to enter an active dialogue with the disembodied voice of ELIZA (the first program to emulate human-to-human interaction, written in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum) and quit formal education [temporarily] at fifteen to dance with the circus. She studied fine art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie of Amsterdam, developing a stance against the two-dimensionality and elitism of gallery culture and looking to popular, street and rebel culture to bring immediacy and entertainment-value into fine art. Between 2002 and 2005 she concentrated on performance, studying modern mime, neo-butoh and the Roy Hart Method in Amsterdam, Seattle and Berlin respectively. Darlin’ continues to draw inspiration from DIY culture, hacker sensibility, guerrilla theatre, outsider and found art, and from wireless memes that cross platforms and borders.
Jesse Darlin’ researches hidden archetypes -- the ghosts in the machine -- in 2d, 3d, and 3.5d; she is currently working on a fanzine, a user-interface crucifix, and a mixed-media series Naked Adventures In Hypotopia.
Post-Pornographies, New Archetypes
And Other Naked Adventures In Hypotopia
Jesse Darlin' is a pirate, rebel, post-postmodernist, rent-a-muse and neo-archetype in progress. Hacking protocols and drawing on formal and informal explorations of archetypology, disposable culture and beauty myths, she walks across the channels and works across the platforms in search of hypotopia – the organic autonomous aesthetic that grows on the psycho-geographic underbelly of popular and consumer culture. Seeking to challenge the tyrannical commoditisation and colonisation of our desires, Darlin’ is a lover [of] and a fighter [for] DIY culture, hacker sensibility, guerrilla theatre, street and found art, and all that still grows and lives and breathes despite everything: “sous les pavés, la plage.” With a background in dance and mime as well as fine art and illustration, Darlin’ has variously worked as a cook, thief, wife, lover, stylist, singer, soda jerker, circus clown, artists' model, music journalist, body-double, literary translator and teenage porn star. She works across various and mixed media including performance, live music, literature, digital/analogue collage, illustration and "experimental living." Jesse Darlin’ advises you to choose the red pill over the blue, to create your own virtual and visceral universe, and to dismantle the firewalls around your heart.
“You can talk about The Context, but The Context lives inside of us, in our hearts and loins; to recognize this in itself a move towards emancipation. To move into and become the spectacle is to transcend it, even just a little; to engage in spontaneous acts of “art” – or artistic living - is to question the hetero-normative status quo; and to deliberately direct The Gaze is to free oneself from its absolute authority.” – Jesse Darlin’
Post-Pornographies And New Archetypes is an ongoing photographic/performative collaboration with artist Cereinyn Ord, exploring spontaneous archetypes and hacking beauty myths: pin-ups for the Hypotopia, reclaiming our naked bodies as our own intellectual property [copyleft].