I Know That You Think That I Think - SADE
CASEY KAUFFMANN //
I KNOW THAT YOU THINK THAT I THINK
SEPTEMBER 6TH - 22ND 2024
GALLERY SADE LOS ANGELES // 204 S AVENUE 19 LA CA 90031
I was dating this guy and he was dumb and very cute. You wouldn’t think he was dumb, he literally worked at NASA as a programmer or something. His roommate was a woman and an engineer who he often talked about in a really negative way. One day he was just roasting this girl, talking about how she was gross and her bag was ugly and dirty for some reason. I responded, “Why are you talking so badly about her? You’re being mean for no reason!” And he was like... “I KNOW THAT YOU THINK THAT I THINK THAT YOU’RE A DUMB BIMBO, BUT I DON'T, I THINK YOU’RE SMARTER THAN HER!!”
This comment offers a laughable distillation of the frightening experience of the filtration of male perspective of both who I am, and who I might think I am. When we perform selfhood or emotion how much of it comes from what we’ve actually experienced or felt? How much comes from the culture we’ve consumed our whole lives? Are we just collages of our consumption? Where do I end and where does culture begin in my perception/ performance of self, identity, and emotion?
These are the questions presented and never answered by the works in I Know That You Think That I Think. My subjects are white women (and one man) expressing heightened “hysterical” emotions from reality television, film, and art history. I’m interested in the identification and decontextualization of that moment when the figure hits the crescendo of drama, the height of emotion. These works are about the line between the real and the performed, the constant movement between representation and reality.
The videos I create digitally push, pull, and stretch the faces and gestures of my subjects to further isolate and intensify that seed of their performative emotion to its most brutal capacity. I manipulate and morph their expressions to take their pain, fear, fury, agony, and anger to a state that moves between plausible physicality and monstrous fiction.
I translate these digital animations through a process of charcoal drawing that pulls the image further away from the original context. It is an added layer of mediation that removes the soul from the image of the physical body leaving an empty vessel for myself and the viewer to fill with their subjective experience. This cumulative dissociation from fixed meaning is achieved through layers of digital and physical manipulation, decontextualization, and conceptual intervention that indicates the fragility of the human image in visual culture.
Where does her actual self or her true expression end and where do the layers of representation and digital manipulation begin? The oscillation between reality and fabrication in these works reveals how susceptible our images are to the outside influence of those who author them. Even as we author or perform our own emotions and selfhood, the knowledge of outside surveillance and the cultural constructs we consume inevitably cloud our access to authenticity or the fallacy of a fixed “self.”