Cake, Ice Cream & Electricity An installation exploring the intersection of girlhood and American Consumer Culture. “GIRL MACHINE,” an exhibition brought to the Honfleur Gallery, Washington D.C. by Cercone looks at The Birthday Party as a female coming of age ritual laying the foundation for the confusing commingling of themes in American consumer society. The birthday party – ultimately a celebration of birth/life – becomes a ritual in which little girls experience “love” and “attention” from their parents, friends and relatives by way of cake, ice cream and pretty pink packages. The project turns a critical eye to the way in which stratagems of advertising have caused girl/womanhood, intimacy, food and personal care products to psychosocially overlap; how “comfort” foods are marketed as a replacement for sex and intimacy. Females are trained since girlhood to use consumable chemical items - put on or in the body – to gratify false needs. Ultimately it is the MACHINE (the GIRL MACHINE) that is doing the reproducing, its main function being the production of girls: pretty, pink, obedient, and always looking for the next fix.
Botánica Azúcar For her first exhibition abroad, Cercone conducts some type of perverse, glittering alchemy as she confuses the territorialization of women and birds. Named Botánica Azúcar (Botánica Sugar) to connote the small store common in Latin America known for its magical or alternative medicine, the substantive theme of this saccharine, sequin strewn paradise of healing is how, as Elizabeth Grosz discusses in Chaos, Territory, Art (1994) – territories are artistically inscribed. Utilizing gems she has scavanged from junk shops in La Plata, Buenos Aires, Cercone visually composes “the refrain,” what Grosz characterizes as the bird’s demarcation of territory though melody and rhythms, routine gestures, bows and dips, her nest, her clearing, her audience of rivals, and desired ones. The refrain is the bird’s chief means of creating a home and circle of control, and paradoxically, her line of flight to the outside. In a healthy bird circulation will reign again. When movement occurs, by way of transformation, migration, deformation; the frame is broken, creative deterritorialization - toward destruction, chaos and freedom - ensues.
Through a bizarre transubstantiation, Cercone’s collages fashion a habitat where women and birds commingle, each habituating herself to the other’s melodies, blocks of color, sensations, postures, pleasures and dangers. What emerges is a narrative critique of the contemporary female condition suggesting that women, like birds, always hover at the edge of breaking free. Female bodies fall prey to particular types of constructed habitats and desires. Domesticated and falsely stratified, particularly by capitalism and medical authority, acculturation cripples female energetic capacity that is by nature, a flow. Whereas bodies should be, “sufficiently rich for the passage of intensities,” dependence is a block. “Drug addicts erect a vitrified and empty body, or a cancerous one: the causal line, creative line or, line of flight immediately turns into a line of death and abolition.” Moreover, creativity, envisioned as a flight line, is a vital means of escape from a territory that has ceased to be of healthful benefit, confirming that art, “is continually haunted by the animal(1).”
1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, quoted in Elizabeth Grosz Chaos, Territory, Art (2008) and Volatile Bodies (1994).
Pleasure's Asylum
What was my internal
necessity? The bone in my throat.
Candy bone, glitter bone, gutter bone, gun bone, gore bone. Light as gift, dark
as reserve. Dark as gift, light as reserve. You, double you: My geometry, my
reservoir, my mote, my drinking straw, my lonely round.
