Goodbye Here, No Matter Where Geetha Thurairajah
You derive from the clichés you know of but have never perceived firsthand. The screen stages for you a place you have never been. You re-present the most reproduced representations.
You seek your reflection but nothing mirrors you. Yet you permit yourself to dissipate in the very landscape that supposedly sustains you.
In its displacement, its dislocation, its dis-identification, the amorphous figure evades circumscription. It affords it anonymity, thus granting it optimum manipulability. Almost plausibility, even.
To be painterly is to deceive. The still surface of stencilled airbrushed pigment obstructs traces of the painter’s hand. Yet you are reminded of it when it superimposes, when it disrupts the narrative, when it intrudes where it is not desired.
You broach the medium’s threshold only to make yourself remember: you are bound to your body.
— Merray Gerges
About the Artist
Geetha Thurairajah is a visual artist based between Toronto and Sackville, NB. Her paintings explore and interpret post-identity experience through a digital lens. She graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design/Rhode Island School of Design in 2014 and completed the 2-D Banff Residency in 2015.
About the Writer
Merray Gerges spent the first half of the twenty-tens doing her undergrad in art history and journalism and co-editing CRIT (critpaper.ca), a free biannual newsprint publication curating contemporary criticism. She is currently the inaugural Emerging Critical Writer-in-Residence at Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and Visual Arts Nova Scotia.
About the Publication
CRIT is a free biannual newsprint publication curating contemporary criticism. It has been produced and circulated nationally by The Khyber Centre for the Arts in Halifax, NS, since fall 2012. IRL back issues will be available at the launch; URL at critpaper.ca
‘This is the second instalment of our “Virtual Existence” 2015/16 publishing cycle, where we examine separate facets of this theme through “Virtual Bodies,” “Virtual Identities,” and “Virtual Desires.” Our goal in undertaking this year-long investigation is to provide CRIT readers and contributors with an offline site from which to critique online culture and the internet age in the provisional form of a newsprint periodical. Virtual identities asks contributors: Do you have virtual identity? What makes it virtual? Is your avatar part of who you are? Are the spaces of online role-play realities or fictions? What does it mean to have a personal aesthetic? Do you project your aesthetic online? Does your smartphone know you? Does it know itself? What’s the difference between programming and consciousness?’
Documentation by Yuula Benivolski