The IUS Dirt Bags Art Club, the IUS Ceramics Art Department and the Ground Floor Lecture Series collaborated to host artist Teri Frame on Jan. 27 and 28 in the Ceramics Studio in Knobview Hall.
On Wednesday, Jan. 27, Frame gave a performance for IUS students in the
Ceramics Studio and on the following day, she lectured on her style of art and
inspiration.
Frame creates a unique blend of performance with art and media of art with the human body itself. Her performances and lectures provide a different look at art and its potentials.
During her performance, audience members watched Frame build new and different faces on her body.
“Each person has an image of themselves, but this is always changing,” Frame said.
Frame said she aims to mirror that process of changing her image in her performances.
Frame then began exploring themes of self-image and the boundaries between men and women with more projects. She began to strive for what she called the combination of revulsion and desire in her work.
Her first project using clay on herself was to put a man’s face on the back of her head. Since then, she has sculpted animals and other masks on her head.
On Thursday, Jan. 28, Frame walked interested students and faculty through the metamorphosis of her own artistic inspirations and endeavors.
Frame graduated with a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2005. She came into the program as an older, non-traditional student. Part-way through the program, a professor came to her with a problem.
“’I’m really not seeing any failures in your work,’” Frame said, quoting her professor. “‘If I’m not seeing any failures, it means you’re not taking risks.’”
Frame said she’s lived the rest of her artistic career trying to figure out the weight of her professor’s words.
It was a failed and broken art project that inspired Frame to do the first project that put her on the path she is now headed down.
A broken ceramic piece got her thinking about the human body and how we process thoughts about it in our mind.
“We fragment and separate different body parts with our language, like leg or torso,” Frame said.
Frame said she was inspired by a concept that the ideas, memories and histories of our ancestors that are stored within our bodies.
She said she used to project pictures from old family photo albums onto the bodies she photographed in order to draw out that point. Many of her photographs would show things such as crying babies on a woman’s belly.
“The body of work acknowledges that love and violence are often intermingled,” Frame said.
Eventually, Frame said she decided these works should have an element of the self-portrait since they were her own family photos.
Instead of bringing in models to pose for her, Frame would use a mirror and a projector in a dark room to put the images on herself. She kept a camera on a tripod and would put it on self-timer and run to her position in order to get the image.
This brought her to the second phase of her artistic inspiration. Frame said she began projecting family portraits onto her own face and posing as her dead relatives.
“There are these expressions, ‘Oh, you have your father’s eyes,’ etc. I wanted to see if that was actually the case,” Frame said.
In order to fit into these projected images, Frame said she had to learn how each family member held their body and learn how to mimic it. She said she considers this project the beginning of her work with performance art.
Sitting alone in a dark room with the faces of dead family members projected onto her own face became a little creepy for Frame a few times.
“[This project] became really terrifying at some points to me,” Frame said. “It was the closest thing I had ever come to seeing ghosts.”
Frame said she noticed a specific difference in the way the men and women carried themselves in these photos.
Her family came from a strong military background, and she could see it in the way the men held their necks tall and pointed their chins out. The women, on the other hand, put a bend in their necks and tended to dip their chins.
“[It’s] a sign of the times and what poses and gestures were considered gender appropriate at the time,” Frame said.
Frame has recently performed and lectured in Missouri, New York and Kentucky, as well as Seoul, South Korea.
By MICHELE HOP