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Jennifer Locke
Choke

Choke documents Jennifer Locke filming a wrestler “choking out” his teammate until he is unconscious. This closed circuit of dominance and submission between two powerful men is echoed by the closed circuit of the video through which the viewer takes on the role of voyeur. The artist’s presence in the piece not only calls attention to its staging but inverts the traditional power dynamic of the “male gaze” and gender roles.

Working in video and installation-based performance, Jennifer Locke stages physically intense actions in relation to the camera and specific architecture in order to explore the unstable nature of artist/model/camera/audience hierarchies. These actions focus on cycles of physicality and visibility, and draw from her experiences as a professional dominatrix, champion submission wrestler, and artist’s model. Locke often creates a separation between her live actions and the audience through the use of material barriers, live video feeds, multiple camera perspectives, wireless microphones, and mini-cameras. These audio-visual reiterations produce a ripple effect, flattening, repeating, echoing, amplifying, and displacing the action by turning it —as well as the audience performing its own spectatorship— into an image of itself.