Two shifts changed the work this year.

Like ME (You?) Better Now was originally conceptualized to use a single male doppelgänger. I cast an actor. He was my height, my hair color, my accent, the same gap in his teeth, and I commissioned prosthetic tattoos to match my own. The work was singularly about gender. In developing it I came to understand that a single male proxy made the work autobiographical. A statement about me, rather than a condition anyone else is subject to. I realized he could not carry Madonna Quilt, or any work that depends on feminized biology, without a degree of appropriation that I was not willing to make. Replacing him with a cast of proxies moved the work out of autobiography and into social commentary. It also brought the viewer inside its meaning, rather than leaving them to observe mine.

The elective Capital Shadow shifted Madonna Quilt. Asked to present a ‘shadow’ I proposed the loss of intimacy with our own bodies. It added a dimension to the quilt. It was not made of waste that happens to be intimate, but intimacy that culture has taught us to classify as waste. The material did not change. What it was evidence of did.

The enquiry does not end with these works. Both proxies so far have been material or human: a garment that held the body, a cast that stood in for the artist. The next is synthetic. ME. (you) Made Me is an autonomous erotic intelligence I am developing. She is a proxy with no literal body at all. But a digital one appropriated from my real one. She extends the same question into a realm without physicality. She is asked to carry physical intimacy, regardless of having anything physical at all.

I am continuing this work beyond the RCA through my art practice and through Intimacy Aura, which takes the enquiry into commercial and public contexts, where intimacy and proximity are addressed by products rather than art. The questions I am carrying forward are the ones these two works opened and did not close. What is owed to a proxy. What is transferred when a body stands in for another. And what proximity without an original beneath it carries at all.

The two works share no material and no form. But the same space. They are the same enquiry approached from different directions. Madonna Quilt is a bodily trace with the body removed. A silent proxy. The trace of a body that cannot speak for itself. Like ME (You?) Better Now is the opposite. It is living proxies who speak, who stand in for the artist and carry the artwork with their own bodies. One keeps the body and loses the person. The other keeps the person and scatters the body across many. In both, the original is absent. The quilt is not me. It is what was close to me. The performer is not me. She is what speaks on my behalf. Neither work contains a true line to the original. Each is made of proxies and asks the viewer to accept proximity as honesty. This is the finding the research arrives at. Intimacy in these works is not closeness to an authentic thing, but closeness to its substitute. Proximity can and does exist without the requirement of an original.