the museum of the copy/pasted identities

September 14 - October 15, 2022

The McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology's Artist in Residence Program is delighted to announce Francisco González-Rosas' onsite exhibition, the museum of the copy/pasted identities.

Following the 2022/23 theme, Our Selfies, Our Selves, the project configures a speculative archeology that links the networked body in digital platforms with the museum exhibition display as a way of interrogating otherness in today's techno-cultural context.

González-Rosas' work is a mesmerizing amalgamation of research on colonialism's history and its legacies within self-archeology and identity. Using their body as subject, Gonzalez-Rosas operates with different media to integrate a digital narrative into the material physical space of the Centre’s Coach House.

About the Exhibition

the museum of the copy/pasted identities is a multichannel video installation developed from 2021 through 2022. The research and exploration started as part of the Permeable Lines residency, at SBC Gallery in Montreal, and concluded with the artist-in-residence inaugural program at the Centre for Culture and Technology, University of Toronto, from July to October 2022.

The project configures a speculative archeology that links the networked body in digital platforms with the museum exhibition display as a way of interrogating otherness in today’s techno-cultural context. The work is based on extensive research on the visual history that the colonial process left in South America, and its legacies within self-archeology and identity.

The installation configures around the main piece “the.museum”, a single-channel projection in which a subjective disembodied camera walks through a museum building. This digital environment is based on real colonial architectures that host museums today at places such as Mexico City, Lima, Santiago, or Cartagena. Every room displays a different sculpture, which presents different forms of self-mediation and technical approaches: body scans, photogrammetry, CGI-generated avatars, among others. These digital renditions exhibit a number of ornamentations, body postures, and visual references from anthropological museum displays and objects, as well as references from modern cinema, pop culture, and art history.

In response to the single-channel -which offers a distanced, more conventional type of viewing- the piece “identity.scape”, a 4-channel monitor installation, shows the same sculptural pieces in a type of impossible viewing. Here, the image is based on the framing that can be achieved through mobile cameras, emphasizing unstable motion, extreme close-ups, and fast speed capturing.

The third piece, “body.masks” is a sculptural monitor-based installation that presents a series of 3D prints of real body scans and two magnifying plastic sheets. The work references at once a dissection bed and the exhibition display common to anthropological museums.

The exhibition is completed with a large-size lenticular print titled “las.yeguas.del.metaverse”, a remake of the iconic piece “Las dos Fridas” by Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. This work has been remade and appropriated several times by queer South American artists such as the Chilean performance collective Las yeguas del apocalipsis and the late Peruvian artist Giuseppe Campuzano.