Event: I Only Hope to Fall Asleep Before I Fall Apart (August 1 - 31 2018, online)
LINK
Art Contemporary Club is proud to present I only hope to fall asleep before I fall apart, the debut online exhibition of Twee Whistler. Known for her multiple representations of Jon Rafman by way of an avatar on her Instagram account, Twee Whistler dives deeper into the universe of the Canadian artist by creating a highly cinematographic and delightful fanfiction charged with guilty pleasures and carefully calculated obsession. Her work lies at the intersection of Marker’s La Jetée and Polanski’s The Tenant, acting as a self-reflexive twist on Rafman’s 2015 artwork Neon Parallel 1996.
Fanfictioning offers girls the opportunity to both experiment with their sexuality and to create a utopia in which they no longer embody the subordinate role that they have been educated to incarnate. In this context, Twee Whistler is free to document her own sex fantasies: she is no longer the mere object of a male sexual desire. It is a statement that is both emancipatory and self-empowering.
Driven by symbolism, psychoanalytic theories, and studies of the subconscious, the young artist evokes canonical moments in these disciplines, such as Lacan's reading of Freud’s Father can't you see that I'm burning? dream interpretation, and Slavoj Žižek reading of Lacan’s. In this particular case, a patient hopes to find relief from an unpleasant situation, but instead faces a even more significant trauma in his dream, and is ultimately forced to return to reality. This circular structure, replayed multiple times in cinema, from David Lynch’s Lost Highway to Vincent Gallo’s Brown Bunny, repeats itself once again in Twee Whistler’s one of a kind huis clos–a closed meta-universe.
I only hope to fall asleep before I fall apart explores cross-dressing as an homage to Currer Bell, Charlotte Brontë’s male pseudonym. Twee Whistler engages in a never-ending costume change, where she candidly switches between identities. Dreams and fantasies joyfully mingle into a saturated referential scenery. Honoring Rafman’s fetish for obsolescence and antiquated tech, Twee Whistler takes over Art Contemporary Club’s website with an aesthetic that can recall the dawn of the Internet Age or early Sega Genesis platform games.
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Similar to the chat room conversation that sp1der_ and ang3l, the main characters of Rafman’s Neon Parallel 1996 are engaged in, the exhibition is accompanied by a real person fiction (RPF) called Sigmund Freud Diaries: in Conversation with Sandra Rafman, a crossover fictional dialogue between Sigmund Freud and Sandra Rafman. Played by Twee Whistler, the latter character is a nod to Robert Bloch’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, where Norman Bates dressed as his mother, Norma Bates. This phantasmagorical reading enables Jon Rafman’s avatar to finally fill the oedipal gap by dressing as his very own mother.
Born in 1995 in Turin, Italy, Twee Whistler is currently graduating from Brera Academy. She has declined a few exhibition invitations due to social anxiety (งಠ෴ಠ)ง, but somehow managed to make it to CHAIN LETTER, a collective exhibition at Hutt Collective, Nottingham, in 2018. (´•u•`)ﾉ She now lives in Milan. (ღ˘⌣˘ღ)
: Art Contemporary Club/Twee Whistler