Skin Installation Document

2007, Video, 7:40

by Gwen Armstrong

In Skin Installation Document, performance artist Gwen Armstrong negotiates the treacherous capacity of skin to be both barrier and opening. While undergoing treatment for breast cancer, she ritually looped over 12,000 elastic bands, then constructed them into a “wall”, metaphor for skin. By day, the artist lived “inside” the wall, communing with gallery visitors; at night she explored her aloneness. On the “outside” of the wall, projected video revealed the intimacies of each step from initial diagnosis through treatment confided nakedly into the camera. Skin Installation Document uses video and still imagery to wonder about skin, our only true boundary in a rapidly globalizing world. As the erected boundaries of modernity fall, how do we gatekeep our bodies, our hearts, our humanity?

ISBN 978-1-55467-963-8