Christine D'Onofrio: Real Tears
to
Deluge Contemporary Art 636 Yates St, Victoria, British Columbia V8W 1L3
Christine D'Onofrio, "Real Tears," 2018
photograph
Opening Friday, January 19, 7–10 pm
D’Onofrio complicates the real and synthetic effects of media as applied in dialogue with social and political struggles of power, liberty, exploitation and humiliation. In this, her most recent work, the artist uses art historical references, filmic tropes and commercial aesthetics to tease out social codes of subjectivity and consider how they affect freedoms and power.
Using tears and the act of crying as both subject and conduit to investigate these codes and their affect, D'Onofrio takes on an analysis of the specific social impositions of sincerity and virtue as contrived "authentic" or "biological" signs that internalize and enforce the feminine position. As an investigation of the deliberate boundaries of what is genuine and what is pretense, Real Tears exists as a hologram, enacting the contranym of the virtual as both "not existing" but also "almost the same."
Christine D'Onofrio is a visual artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She was born and grew up in Toronto, Ontario and attended York University for her BFA. D'Onofrio completed an MFA at the University of British Columbia where she now teaches.
Curated by Wil Aballe