DOUBLE TROUBLE
On view from July 8 – September 17, 2021
Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design
ICA Gallery hours: Wed–Sun, 12:00 – 5:00pm
Sonia Almeida · Bianca Beck · Sascha Braunig · Lucy Kim · Joiri Minaya
DOUBLE TROUBLE exhibits the work of five artists working in the mediums of painting, sculpture, photography, and installation. These artworks reflect on the idea of the double - as mirror, repetition, second skin, or iteration - in ways that wrestle with representation and self definition.
The doubled body asserts a special fascination for us. Revealed in countless works of film, literature and other arts, the realm of the doppelgänger provokes the terrifying possibility that we are not in control of ourselves and indeed, to our horror, that this other untethered self operates unbeholden to our desired aims and fancies. The stunt double or body double, by contrast, performs a kind of service, inhabiting a pseudo-self in order to perform a dangerous or unwanted task, providing safe distance and the opportunity to "see" another self.
Much like the literary or filmic character of the doppelgänger or stunt double, the social body shaped by societal expectations, assumptions, and stereotypes, is rarely at rest with a felt sense of who we are. We are constrained within this other self; applied by the limited lenses of gender, race, or nationality, for example; inhabiting a body double composed of countless compromises and personal elections for safety, security, and success.
Using this area of conflict and self-construction as a form of resistance to given scripts and preconceived bodies, the artists in DOUBLE TROUBLE claim the power of the doubled body to upend perceptual habits, move the boundaries of the assumed, challenge notions of identity, perform sleights of hand, and to joyously assert new ways of seeing ourselves.
DOUBLE TROUBLE is organized by Director of Exhibitions Julie Poitras Santos
Featured Image: Joiri Minaya, Container #4, 2020, archival pigment print