Artist's Statement
Curly Toes is part of a series of works examining what are the limits of language the limits of? This work is part of a practice that works as a type of digging (think root canal) into the tropologies of the common mouth. It borrows attitudes, characters and cultural frames of reference to re-contextualizing extremes of language into a range of peformative visual work. (think ventriloquism) This is intended to be uncomfortable work tunneled towards monstrous spaces of stubborn sounds that dismay as much as they discomfort. The work bashes out verbal gestures that move towards the raw and the obscene as an open queries into the said and further into the unsaid. In this margin the flawed vies with dopey, insults with the deadpan, goofy, brutal, strange, funny, the gone awry, the vulgar, with the mis-grammared vernacular. All is burlesque, a grotesque-opera, a droll stop-gap revealing the rupture of the unsaid in the misshape of speech.
This line of work focuses on performing the Sounded OUT by creating dummies and scores that are represented increasingly in the virtual vocabularies. They are between...and so nameless things that bulge and protrude into the language of non-sense. As thing, they are a sort of heard as they are approached through sites of both abjection and pleasure. And as in all language this sounded one is like perfume, they have an unpredictable indecipherable affect.
I have an interest in working with 'lowbrow' materials and 'widearm' networking.
Majena Mafe is a sonic artist and researcher (PhD—nearly finished) working with sounded-language, Gertrude Stein, and experimental writing with a feminist twist. For this video, she used a painting by Boris Vallejo (visible in its original state at http://wallpapers.brothersoft.com/boris-vallejo-paintings-43155.html) and the song "Curly Toes" from ongs in the Key of Z, Vol. 2: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music.
You can learn more about Jena at her blog, her research site Un-sound sound, or her page at Furtherfield.org.
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