Whoa Whoa Studio refracts Donegan's earlier performance work through the lens of a studio art practice. The artist subverts the tradition of studio painting by using a computer to make simple line drawings. Later, the computer is transformed into a canvas through the regressive act of directly marking the monitor. Painting is related to scatology as a correlation is made between art making and infantile fantasy.
The artist writes: "These works form a capstone to concerns that have been in my work since I began to make video -- the artist's studio as theatre, the self-conscious/self-reflexive gesture that unites performance and painting, creation unraveled. The space for painting/performance is very shallow - a makeshift set, the television screen, the frame of a painting. In this tautological space the performer, both object and subject, views herself from both sides of the mirror. The gestures performed are fleeting, interrupted, handicapped; the performer's back is against the wall. The imagery plays a game with elements that are part of the creative process - clean and dirty, sight and blindness, fullness and emptiness, chance and effort."
This title is available for exhibitions, screenings, and institutional use through Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), NY. Please visit the EAI Online Catalogue for further information about this artist and work. The EAI site offers extensive resources for curators, students, artists and educators, including: an in-depth guide to exhibiting, collecting, and preserving media art; A Kinetic History: The EAI Archives Online, a collection of essays, primary documents, and media charting EAI's 40-year history and the early years of the emergent video art scene; and expanded contextual and educational materials.