Saya Woolfalk

"Untitled drawing," 2004
Gouache on paper
9.5" x 12.5"
Courtesy of the artist
Estimated value: $800
Starting bid: $200

"Visual media act as narrative technologies that shape perception, order symbolic language, and help inform the way we perceive the world. Drawing material from various realms of the visual—pop-culture, ritual, street-spectacle—I use art as a laboratory to catalogue and critique our socio-visual landscape. Combining performance, sculpture, painting, and video, my installations investigate and playfully re-imagine the representational systems that hierarchically shape our lives. My art is an experimental ground where I create alternative bodies, environments, and consciousnesses.

A black, white, and Japanese woman, my work is inspired by ethnographic, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory. I spent two years going back and forth between Brazil and the United States and will travel to Japan in the fall of 2008. All three countries have had an enormous influence on my practice.. My sketches are a notational system; from them, I make paintings that recombine texts, images, and objects. From the two-dimensional I move to the three-dimensional and create landscapes. Through performance and video I activate those landscapes and produce narrative."