Dana dal Bo
Self-Less

We are proud to present Dana Dal Bo’s self-Less, an interactive installation of work that extends from the dc3 Art Projects booth at VOLTA13 to public bathrooms at the Markthalle and a bespoke website online. Dal Bo is an emerging contemporary Canadian artist whose work explores identity, self-surveillance, voyeurism, exhibitionism and selfie culture.

Three distinct projects comprise self-Less that all take the mirror, the catalyst for the development of self, as the starting point for the work. Here, Dal Bo examines the roles of narcissism, scopophilia, censorship, consent and surveillance, particularly in the age of technology where there is not only the compulsion to look, but also the compulsion to record and disseminate.

Within the booth and the public bathrooms, walls are papered with hundreds of nude selfies scavenged from online sources including Twitter, Snapchat and revenge porn sites. Dal Bo has greyscaled the screenshots and used digital manipulation to erase the identity of the individual, representing everyone and no one. This practice of taking bathroom nudes with a smartphone is prolific and used for intimate sharing, public consumption and commercial gain, however in this context it is indeterminable whether the source was the subject with personal exhibitionistic intention, pornography produced for profit, or revenge porn circulated against their will.

By taking their own selfies in the bathroom mirrors and hashtagging #ccselfless, visitors become part of the ongoing archive associated with self-Less.

#ccselfless

Selected naked bathroom selfies have been rephotographed using a 4×5 camera to create a series of unique carbon prints from hand-made negatives. The tension of combining digitally pirated images with a rare and complex traditional photographic process is reflected in the series title Carbon Copy, which refers to the manual process of copying documents that has been coopted in digital correspondence as CC.

Continuing to reproduce, reinterpret and redistribute found images in the series In Watching My Reflected Image I Have Begun to Surveil Myself, Dal Bo has sourced vintage negatives through online channels of individuals gazing in mirrors and developed them as one-off silver gelatin prints. The source and subjects of the photographs are unknown, and in developing the images Dal Bo engages with problems of image production, distribution, copyright and consent. Framed with the original negative embedded inside, the responsibility for the life of that image is then passed along to the acquirer of the work.

Mirrors reveal us to ourselves. The interactive work Mirror, Monitor, Screen reflects, multiplies and disperses the image of self and makes real the metaphorical surveillance mechanism of the mirror. Embedded within a mirror are video cameras and a monitor that doubles the viewer’s image and streams it to a secondary location within the space as well as online to a live website.

To whom does an images belong? Who is watching and who is watched? The work in the installation self-Less asks how we capture and circulate our own image, and how our image can be captured and circulated.

Dana Dal Bo’s work moves in and between photo, video, textiles, performance, and online. She draws inspiration from reality TV, surveillance practices, the history of medicine and psychology, infomercials and pop culture, and porn. Her work has been shown widely across Canada, USA and Europe, and she will have an solo show at CICA New Media Art Conference in Korea in August 2017. Dal Bo completed her MFA in Fibres and Material Practices at Concordia University in 2017 and currently lives and works in Montreal, Canada.