Whoa Whoa Studio (for Courbet)

2000, 3:21 min, color, sound

Whoa Whoa Studio refracts Donegan's earlier performance work through the lens of a studio art practice. The artist subverts the tradition of studio painting by using a computer to make simple line drawings. Later, the computer is transformed into a canvas through the regressive act of directly marking the monitor. Painting is related to scatology as a correlation is made between art making and infantile fantasy.

The artist writes: "These works form a capstone to concerns that have been in my work since I began to make video -- the artist's studio as theatre, the self-conscious/self-reflexive gesture that unites performance and painting, creation unraveled. The space for painting/performance is very shallow - a makeshift set, the television screen, the frame of a painting. In this tautological space the performer, both object and subject, views herself from both sides of the mirror. The gestures performed are fleeting, interrupted, handicapped; the performer's back is against the wall. The imagery plays a game with elements that are part of the creative process - clean and dirty, sight and blindness, fullness and emptiness, chance and effort."

Available on

 
 
2000, 8:16 min, color, sound