MaryKate Maher "Ringers"

fromMK Maher to NuNu /TJ HUNG ART&DESIGN <nunuhung@gmail.com>
dateTue, May 26, 2009 at 9:20 PM

MaryKate Maher "Ringers" This initial project I interpreted as a small work to help us understand and know our partner. Correspondence can be open or limited, and through mail and email can be interpreted in many ways. For me, the concept of ‘knowing our partner’ became a mix between imagining what my partner was like and fitting my interpretation together with the pieces she actually revealed. Thus resulting in a ‘person’ to whom I have placed certain personal attributes with an actual body of visual work I respect and admire. My larger project on Yin-Ling is based on the theory of the Doppelganger. From the initial viewing of her work to our topical email conversations (our interests in film, art and culture), I realized we have a similar taste and visual vocabulary. I wanted to address the concept of ‘same’ as twin, or more suitably, as Doppelganger-- a mixture of twin/shadow/counterpart also sometimes portrayed as good vs. evil. I decided to start off simple and request a mask of Yin-Lings face, in exchange for a mask of my face. She sent me two. One I wore and the other my husband wore. The masks fit each of us differently as the paper contoured to our bone structure, resulting in a strange pseudo twin. I took photographs of me (Yin-Ling) telling secrets to him (Yin-Ling). This created an even more bizarre triplet, as we both became “Yin-Ling”, each a different version (a Yin-Ling known only to us in theory through mail and the internet). Once this work is complete, each secret spoken will partner with the photographs and be playing simultaneously creating a low cacophony of whispers. The secrets are still being created; however the ones I will use in the final work will be a combination of the real Yin-Ling and the doppelganger’s information. A result is the existence of a ‘person’ and their personal data, which may or may not truly exist.