We met Beth Schellenberg during her stay at Ace Art's Cartae Open School residency which Schellenberg completed along with four other resident creatives earlier this summer. A lot of what Schellenberg is interested in the work she investigates into centers on how we identify ourselves in digital spaces and how that changes our perception of ourselves in tangible reality. 

 

 

Schellenberg speaks further on her research and her experience in the residency:  

 

I'm exploring this liminal space between our virtual realities versus our physical realities. That place exists on our phones or on our computers or with our webcams before we actually post it; this in-between phase where we are trying to find the right version of ourselves to put out there. And I’m really curious about that—the moment when that happens and I try to depict that.

 

 

 

I’ve never had a space like this before. It’s definitely been a treat getting to have the space to work in alongside my amazing studio mates. Everyone has a hectic schedule so I’m typically here by myself but when I do get one of them here it’s nice. We try to give each other feedback and suggestions on our individual work.

 

 

 

 

 

I like the inkling of talking about these contemporary subjects putting them through a traditional medium. I like the idea of seeing these little screen images being blown up big on a wall with paint and canvas. I’m interested in seeing how the meaning changes if you present it in a different way; if it has more weight or less.

 

 

 

I'm currently doing an doing an independent research program at University of Winnipeg and I’m examining about visual cultures in the modern age. That has a lot to do with the work I’m doing now. It has a lot to do with how we present ourselves in modernity which is an age old question people have always been thing about. Things are changing so quickly and we as people are having to adapt rapidly to all these new media platforms and online profiles to a point we don’t even notice that we are changing as well. And it’s not bad or good but I’ve been very curious on how its changing us, how our bodies are responding to that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I want to learn more about how forms of social interaction proliferate online, and transform the ways we define ourselves and are perceived by others. The migration to online life highlights the complex and contradictory relationship we have with surveillance and consumerism (iCloud, Instagram, Facebook etc.), a fact made increasingly visible in art and popular culture. The critical examination of these modalities is crucial in learning how to adapt to and positively interact with changing technologies while remaining aware of their potential to change and subsume a perceived sense of self, impact relationships, and alter language. I hope that through my studies I am able to trace the contours and consequences of digital immersion on the individual and on cultural production in our late capitalist society.

 

 

 

I've been making these portraits during the residency and I've been interested in this text 'I’m here can U C me' which is intended to offer some context for the portraits and the mouse cursor installation. The women featured are strangers whose selfies I found on IG. The phenomenon of people mediating loneliness by posting photos of themselves for the viewing pleasure of an online public has fascinated me from the day I got Instagram, and my pieces in the exhibition were meant to explore the isolation exposed by certain types of online expression. The “peering into a webcam with a somewhat vacant look” selfie that shows up every so often allows the viewer to speculate as to the emotion or intent behind such a post, given that the image itself holds so few clues. These images can function as a type of empty container, completely divorced from their creator and waiting to be filled with the viewer’s assumptions, preconceptions, and desires.

 

 

 

 

I recreated selfies of women in monochrome squares (meant to echo the restrictions of photo booth and IG) on flesh coloured backgrounds in order to play with the idea of people willingly releasing little bits of themselves indiscriminately on the web, flesh made digital and circulated within an economy of images. The spooky thing for me is the subject having no idea what might become of those somewhat vulnerable images of themselves, of how they might be used or interpreted, no control over who is staring back into their eyes via screen. Trying to translate an image as inherently digital as the selfie into a traditional medium (paint on canvas) was an attempt to see if it affected the meaning of the image, if it lent it a different weight or elicited a different response to see it hanging life sized on a wall rather than on a 2 inch screen.