Going mental over body parts

Floria Sigismondi's new show reveals dark side of local artist

Floria Sigismondi has already achieved a legendary status in the contemporary art scene. And it's a phenomenal feat for a woman so young to have already exhibited with the likes of big leaguers such as Cindy Sherman and Annie Lebowitz.
But it's more than just her art that puts Sigismondi in the spotlight; it's herself. Shrouded in an aura of charisma and eccentric fashion, Sigismondi is a phenomenon making a statement of fearlessness, an aesthetic punchline wherever she goes. It's an understatement to say that heads turn when Floria enters the room, embodying something daring, something powerful that forms the husk of every artistic venture she pursues.
While you may have missed your opportunity to encounter the star at her opening night at MOCCA (The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art), you certainly haven't missed the inspired works presented there this month. Not limited by any one medium, she presents a cacophony of works merging into one another, which range from painting to photography, film, sculpture and installation.
Come Part Mental, an exhibition soon headed on its way to New York, where Floria divides her time, refigures the human body in an age of infinite genetic and technological possibilities. With photographs that twist the recognizably human into an alien-like machine, with mannequin-type women remodelled to expose a uterus containing a fetus, nipples that stretch insanely heavenward, and sexualized mannequin legs stuck out from a stretch of wall, Floria allows us a perversion of spirit.
As viewers we are enticed into the horrific beauty of mutation in perhaps the same way that Marilyn Manson, Sheryl Crow, and Bjork were, so much so that they have asked her to collaborate. But along with directing music videos, she's also completed Redemption, a hardcover volume of her photographic work published in Germany in 1998.
Named after a character in the opera Tosca and born to Italian opera singer parents, perhaps it's no wonder she derives such inspiration from tragedy. "In order to find ourselves, we must destroy ourselves. The human race craves the experience."
What this means for creating is implicit in the show. The norms challenged, the body destabilized and deconstructed, the boundaries pushed to include other contents formerly thought to not belong, such as reptilian fins sprouting from the back spine of one mannequin, or the box-sprouting humanoid arms on each corner containing a screen featuring someone's buttocks.
Despite several years of art school at the Ontario College of Art, it was a couple of photography courses in her final year of study that set Floria on a journey not even she could have predicted. But her dark visions of future bodily catastrophe, her sexualized reinventions of womanhood and android, fascinated a whole generation of music and video creators.
The nerve she touched reverberated across MTV and MuchMusic, though few of us probably even recognized that the poet behind the images was not the musician, but the director composing the futuristic symphony.
This exhibition is essential for all to see and feel. It's an experiential show, and seriously beats a boring walk through the AGO.
Floria Sigismondi's Come Part Mental shows at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 5040 Yonge St., until Oct. 28.

Publication Date: 2001-10-21
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