My studio practice explores the anxiety of the gaze expressed through body language. Through moving image, several aspects of voyeurism and surveillance are addressed. The work conveys various gestures and movements of the body to portray anxiety. It aims to show the discomfort felt under scrutiny of a stranger in
a public place, the judgmental stare
of an authority gure, or simply an innocent look that is interpreted
as malicious. Bright colours are juxtaposed with a sombre theme,
the movements slow and deliberate, somewhat unsettling. The work is based on French psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan’s theory of ‘’the gaze’’, and three of his identi ed aspects
of it: the oral drive (the erogenous zones are the lips, the partial object the breast) the scopic drive (the eyes and the gaze) and the invocatory drive (the ears and the voice). The video uses these three aspects as a basis and concept, and expresses each of them through a combination of visual and aural elements.