Dancer

By Mimi Cabell

Dancer is about the dissonance between a real body and a represented one, and what we desire and expect of both. I was sent a video of a virtual lap dancer, and I had the desire to become the animated body that I saw. Dancer is a nine-minute video of two arms that move independent of a body. The body—the center—has been erased and, with it, the logic driving its movement. In the absence of the motion’s origin, what is seen in the video are the consequences of that motion laying bare the fracture between the real and the represented body, and the absurdity of not only this performance, but of those that inspired it. A body of parts that do not correspond: this is what I wanted to be. To see oneself fractured is perhaps the hardest part, and also the most spectacular.

Mimi Cabell

Mimi Cabell was born in Nanaimo, B.C., Canada. She works with language, video, photography, and sound; her main areas of research are identity and representation. In 2012 Traumawien Press published a collaborative text-based work, American Psycho. Her work is part of the Revista Laboratorio at the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, and held in the Mira Godard Study Center Collection at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. She has shown work in New York and Toronto, and has presented or performed at conferences and festivals in Sao Paulo, Paris, London, Hsinchu City, Taiwan, and at MIT in Boston. She holds an MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in electronic writing from Brown University. Currently she is a critic at the Rhode Island School of Design. She lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.

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Dancer

Mimi Cabell

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