PARTICIPANTS
    Dorit Cypis

Dorit Cypis explores questions of identity and representation through performance, multimedia installation, and photography. She often focuses on issues of authorship, the threshold between subject and object, and modes of seeing. Much of her work is performative, involving strategies to literally penetrate the image in order to uncover layers of meaning - this performance exists as residue in the form of photographs. Cypis is concerned with the body as the medium through which knowledge is gained. Cypis received an M.F.A. in 1977 from the California Institute ofthe Arts. Her work has been shown in numerous international and national exhibitions that include such venues as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the New Museum, New York; among others. Her work is part of the Walker's permanent collection.

LINK Dorit Cypis to: http://www.walkerart.org/programs/sos/cypisframe.html

    Symposium Abstract: "Can I see you without seeing me?"

How is the world of space and time mirrored in one's bodily life of virtual and direct experience? If we represent history as a dimensional tapestry, how are we each weaver and fabric? If memory is not in the past but the present, what do I remember? I see with all my senses. Who am I as seer? Whom do I see?

As corporeal beings we travel simultaneously through interior experience and exterior reflection of the fractured planes and surfaces of the social spaces we inhabit. The journey is physical and virtual, full of confusion, elation, promise, conflict, dead-ends and gateways. We navigate through time and space in all directions, wanting to remember, craving to forget. Stories, which cannot be held by narrative, erupt from silent places.

My production is an ongoing investigation of the phenomenology of seeing, knowing and experiencing. I weave representation through complex strategies crossing photography, performance, installation, sculpture and social actions.

The immersive environments I create incorporate photographs, often of projected still and moving images, sound, video, raw materials and objects, mixing digital and analog technologies. I employ these elements to charge the given space into a place of active engagement where the viewer may experience their seeing, remembering, and knowing. My challenge is to excite a phenomenological "place" breaking through the surface of knowing, where ones interior experience mixes with onešs direct experience of the social space.

Here relationships are recognized as simultaneously public and private. Central motifs through my work include....permeability of public and private; blending of subject and object; relationships between corporeality, memory, history and social space; formal plays with seeing and being seen. I strategically place the viewer in conscious participation with an image, object or constructed situation, implicated in the construction of meaning. The exhibition site becomes a place of active engagement and experience, where subjectivities lie in the folds