There is a quiet, somewhat uneasy minimalist ethos maintained in the interiors of late capitalism -- all van der Rohe on adderall. Often populated spaces are captured as sparse as possible; every rogue body is a blip. And as the distinction between the image, the fetish object, and the body, that assumed perceiving subject meld into one another, we arrive at what can perhaps be best described as a locus of seamless incongruity. The failure of modernism to fully accommodate the body is the victory of the body to be known. The movement, a single file shuffle through corridors lined in AstroTurf, and subquently domestic rug, is reminiscent as much of a shopping aisle as it is of a labyrinth etched upon a faded church basement floor: one is devoted to the suggestion of difficulty, but the challenge is forced, arrived at from within. One moves nowhere but towards the self, and in this instance that occasional existential discomfort of conspicuous consumption is brought to the fore. In this space, consumption is a body-based practice; browsing, pausing in the artificial light, all of it entirely somatic. The phenomenological articulation of this reality, that all bodies exist in a pervasive nexus of influences and impulses, neatly catalogued and hidden from the immediate field of vision but easily activated by a simple swipe or scan is made apparent. The weight of the unseen, of metadata etched in barcodes, finds itself in the self. Stripped of implication -- of object and desire -- the body is rendered as an apolitical beacon of experience, suggesting a post-commodity poetics of pure information.

– Sasha Semenoff

Anna Semenoff is a Calgary-based artist currently attending her third year at the Alberta College of Art + Design. Her practice is comprised of video and sculptural works.

Sasha Semenoff is a Calgary-based writer, at turns both aspiring poet-critic and art historian.

They are siblings.