(photographs by Coke Whitworth)
Using video performance and projection, Kia Mercedes Carscallen explores how an individual body cannot be healthy in a social system that is ill. In Systemic, performed by Kia, she plays with the notion of being comfortable in one’s own skin while bearing the heaviness and constant pervasiveness of oppressive cultural systems which mask individuals in fear and denial. It is here she reveals persistent desire – through vision – to become something new. The personal bodily engagement which is a hallmark of Kia’s work evokes the exertion required, at the level of muscle and tissue, to see what one is conditioned not to see.