Alice Lang "Buffer Zone" (2015), HD video, 7:57 mins
Alice Lang is an Australian artist based in Los Angeles. Her cross-disciplinary art practice utilizes a variety of media such a ceramics, painting, collage and video to examine how existing power structures disseminate and manifest within individual bodies and mass culture. Her work examines the way in which culture and context influence the meaning and value of text, objects and images and how this shifting relationship can be used to subvert dominant paradigms and reclaim space for female voices.
“Buffer Zone" is a video performance which examines the body as a site of objectification. Clothing and fashion are a form of social communication that is often perceived to play a key role in encouraging the objectification, dehumanization and denial of agency for female bodies. The repetitive act of layering a set of 10 custom made jumpers within this video, which get larger and larger, heavier and bulkier until they threaten to engulf and smother the artist, seeks to explore and complicate these ideas, challenging the notion that clothing (which conforms to modesty norms) is a safe space.