Julia Prudhomme: "Just Passing Through"

×

Expand

"Just Passing Through, (video still)"

Julia Prudhomme, "Just Passing Through, (video still)," 2013, video 32 min.

Julia Prudhomme is currently a Master of Fine Arts student at UBC Okanagan with a focus on photography and video installation. Her final thesis exhibition titled Just Passing Through explores the performed female body as scripted by social conventions. Prudhomme's work is essentially a self-conscious process of layering, which primarily uses herself as an anonymous medium to embody certain female enigmas kept secret - female mysteries - by etiquette rules, ritualized ceremonies, and popular culture. She wears the personae of characters who walk the line between imagined reality and social fiction held within collective memory; a notion further asserted by Avital Ronell's fable as being a true fiction concerned with origins that is hidden in full view of society. This exhibition attempts to explore these themes on a local, place-minded scale through the fabrication of a composite character named LuLu Miller. Lulu haunts/exists in hotel rooms along Highway 97, mixing maternal family stories and archival media with a meticulously documented first-degree murder trial and Harold Pinter's stage play, The Birthday Party. Prudhomme mingles reality and fiction in order to express the imposed and assumed modalities of being.