Appropriating images from body horror films, my practice is an attempt to visualize Julia Kristeva’s theory of  The Abject as an abstract from. I aimed to not only analyze the representation of feminine abject in body horror films but also to actively engage with and interrogate the audience’s perception of the female form and its intersection with horror cinema. The film plays with visibility by thinking about what is allowed to fit in the frame and what is even recognizable. I allow for a digitized mold to infect the surface of the film and a kaleidoscopic effect produced by multiple super impositions to create monstrous humanoid bodies with extra limbs and multiple heads. The images have been ripped from their original contexts and abstracted to near meaninglessness.

My practice rips the synchronous sound of the original film clips to create a disorienting soundtrack that prevents a viewer from being able to anchor oneself. I refrain from using dialogue and distinguishable speech with the goal of the soundtrack being to create noise that would be representative of the abject while still being derived from the films themselves. By taking sound bites from films and distorting them to the point that they are hardly audible, I would be directly attacking the structure of the symbolic order, to convey the idea that the abject is never fully cleansed from society.

The practice is meant to be presented as an installed piece with the aim of bringing the abject into a physical space. The film loops and is projected through various glass pieces that act as a screen to further distort and conceal the image. The film conceptually becomes a body and the wall that it is projected on becomes the “skin” of the film. The glass serves as a physical object that marks and “harms” the skin of the body of the work. A conceptual representation of the violent violation of the human body that is central to the body horror genre, paying homage to the footage that has been appropriated in the first place.