Emerging artist bridges technological realms
NEW media and electronic artist Jordana Maisie's recent work, Potential Energy, has been shortlisted for the 2009 Celeste: International Contemporary Art Prize.
LEXI LANDSMAN
IN Jordana Maisie’s graduating project of her fine arts degree at the College Of Fine Arts, she shaved her head on Sydney’s Town Hall steps while being filmed. The footage formed a challenging work that questioned identity construction and marginalisation.
“That work was quite a personal work,” says Maisie, a new media and electronic artist who admits she doesn’t like being in front of the camera.
“It was the beginning of the journey into new media for me being my first video work.”
That journey has continued and developed. From the depths of a miniature dollhouse in her 2007 work Professional Voyeur Part One, the audience became voyeurs, straining to overhear a woman’s voice speaking of an intimate relationship.
A year later, in her work, Movement as Metaphor -— a recreation of a studio apartment -— voices made commonplace remarks, which emerged from within the furniture, when tripped by sensors.
In her most recent offering, Potential Energy, the audience gleans a world of digital ports, portals and corporeality. Through exposing the limitations of communication technologies like Facebook and iPhones, she creates an experience of disembodiment, revealing the importance of human physical connection.
Not one to dabble in just one form, the work pushes boundaries encompassing photography, video, sound, and interactive installation. Going a step further, the body of work relies on the audience’s bodily presence in order to activate. The innovative work has recently been shortlisted for the 2009 Celeste: Inter-national Contemporary Art Prize.
But it is just one of the list of accolades quickly piling up for the 25-year-old emerging artist, who graduated from Moriah College.¬† Maisie has just been granted her most prestigious award to date -— the highly-sought after ANZ Private Bank and Art & Australia Contemporary Art Award.
“I feel very privileged and flattered,” Maisie says on receiving the award, which promotes the work of an emerging artist. “It’s a lovely compliment, and I feel lucky and thankful to be recognised.”
Indeed, the humble artist’s recognition is rising steadily. Maisie has had two exhibitions in Australia running concurrently -— Potential Energy showed at Kings Gallery in Melbourne last month as did a group exhibition, Showing Off: A New Media Survey, at the Bathurst Regional Gallery.
She is also in the middle of a four-week research and development residency at Io Myers Studio at the University of New South Wales in partnership with Critical Path, where she is making a collaborative dance and technology hybrid work with dancemaker Adam Linder.
Her full schedule comes just after three months spent abroad. She left Sydney in May to exhibit her work in Korea, where she was the only new-media artist invited to make a work for the Chuncheon Arts Festival.
After the two-week project, she relocated to Berlin, Germany, where she is now based, and began a mentorship with media artist and designer of the interactive software Isadora -— Mark Coniglio.
Looking to the future, Maisie plans to stay in Berlin indefinitely, and hopes to keep exploring the relationship between technology, physical space and the body.
“My work is very challenging at times on a number of levels. It’s quite personal, quite exposing and unstable from a financial perspective. But I love it and I feel lucky to be able to see where it can take me, and that’s good enough for me at this point.”
For more information visit jordanamaisie.com.