Contingent Bodies
Brigitta Kocsis’ paintings blend realism, illustration and expressive painterly gestures in a chaotic and visually charged landscape. Her current series, Contingent Bodies, focuses on the representation of bodies in transformation – both organic and unfamiliar. The painting’s surface is used to transform energies and refabricate the body with suggestions of contamination, connectivity and displacement, reflecting Kocsis’ cultural history as a Hungarian, Romany and Canadian. Fragmented bodies emerge in the play between abstraction and figuration, embedded in perpetual rootlessness, containing exile and otherness within themselves. These polymorphic figures confront sexual and cultural categorization, recasting the body as part imaginary and part construct. Exploring notions of the cyborg and the prosthetic, these figures exist between the human and post-human, biotechnological and sexualized bodies, and the fashion industry and anime.
Kocsis' work focuses on investigating the shifting concepts of the human body and its environment. Contemporary discoveries in anatomical techniques have profoundly changed how one perceives the human body. Kocsis explores how technology can alter perceptions by interacting with the methods and processes involved in how the human body works. In Kocsis' work, a series of characters is created with multi-part anatomical and technological allusions with a specfic "trade" or "trait" assigned to each character; like dysfunctional poetic super-heroes in a contemporary comic strip. These figures are like actors and depict a kind of repulsive contemporary beauty where science fiction and artificial body parts are no longer fiction. The tension contained within the bodies of the characters due to the pervasive technologies communicates a sense of contemporary environment in its fractured state.