Through her work, Christine D’Ornofrio negotiates the tensions and promises of power found in acts of humour, virtue, narcissism, humiliation, desire, technology and community. The moments she exploits point to intuitive effects and ideologies, sometimes seen as ‘accidents’ to reveal characteristics of mediation that tie personal and political agency.
A focus of her practice is to build dialogue between subject position and the histories, achievements and fallacies of feminist art via mediation and technology. In former works, she has implied that a change in perspective can present an alternative to a rigid systematic structure, or she has confronted her fear of depicting the female body in the conditions of representation by utilizing the gesture of falling that carries both potential and failure. D’Onofrio revealed the contradictions between subversive and derogatory effects of humour, and revealed the power of codes as attributed to tears as simultaneously material and simulated existing within the same referent, or the generative nature of intuitive and tacit connections that influence and are foundational to a creative community.
D’Onofrio struggles with the notion of liberty and its limitations within structures, whether; representational, conceptual, social, economic, political. She reveals the forces of capitalist patriarchy, individualistic neoliberalism and colonial practices that ultimately direct and exploit potential fluid ‘grey zones’, and expose what further facilitates and perpetuates power. Since we working within the system, how can one imagine the potential act of liberty? How can new meaning be created, produced and organized or how can one erupt the production of meaning altogether -and still survive? For subjects to not belong to something, free of titles, codes and limitations, it would exist in crisis. In her work she asks for some concept of liberation to be realized, but liberation only exists when it does not know its end.
At the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, D’Onofrio exhibits a new work that critiques agency as it ‘belongs to’ representational systems, in this case a white female spinster, crazy “cat lady”, pseudo-feminist icon. Her inquiry into the function of social and cultural oppressions to ensure perpetuating power structures perform themselves is to discover new portrayals of the ageing white female embodiment and privilege. Because co-opted depictions of rebellion make revolutionary actions defunct of their power, she questions our place in an intersectional self-aware social, cultural and political theory and deliberately engage both the triumphs and perils of feminist art practice, history and visual culture.
cat cat cat will be on view in our Main Gallery from September 8th - October 20th, 2023.
cat cat cat, in the Main Gallery, 2023.
Christine D’Onofrio (she/her/they) is an uninvited and grateful guest on the unceded ancestral territories of šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmaɁɬ təməxʷ (Musqueam), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ təməxʷ (Tsleil-Waaututh), Skwxwú7mesh-ulh Temíx̱w (Squamish), and S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō) nations that some refer to as Vancouver. She has exhibited work across Canada, including; Eyelevel, Modern Fuel, deluge, Gallery 44, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, and La Centrale. She has given artist talks and served on panels in various institutions, including the Vancouver Art Gallery and “Art Now” lectures at the University of Lethbridge.
Active in her art community, she has served on the Board for Access Gallery and set up over a hundred engaged learning placements for students. As the second generation of European immigrants, she was raised as a guest on the traditional land of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabewaki and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nations. D’Onofrio has a BFA from York University and an MFA from the University of British Columbia where she currently teaches.
Learn more about D’Onofrio’s work by visiting her website.