Body Rituals at CAC

April 25th-May 12th, 2010

CAC's East Side Projects presents in celebration of Las Vegas Pride 2010:

Body Rituals, by Jean-René Leblanc

The Body Rituals series is a personal exploration of the concept of new male subjectivity, the fluidity and discontinuity among sex - gender - identity, and the phantasmic processes of constructing the body. The strategic conflation of lace, a "male" body and the absence of any specific genitalia is an attempt to destabilize any visual reading of gender assumptions constructed on a strict historical binary framework supported by the medical gaze. The absence of the head acts to liberate the gaze from the dualistic world of desire. Such mobility of gender offers a possibility to the viewer to transgress prescriptive notions of desire.

Jean-René Leblanc is the Head of the Art Department and professor of digital arts at the University of Calgary in Canada. He is co-founder of the Sensorium Lab, a cross-disciplinary research group focusing on research that develops systems of interaction that encourage kinesthetic perception and interpretation. He received his BFA in 1993 from Concordia University, his MFA in 1996 from the University of Windsor Ontario and completed a PhD in study and practice of art from the Université du Québec à Montréal in 2006. Mr. Leblanc’s works have been exhibited in Canada, the United States of America and Europe.