Impressions by Mistress Fix and Sammie Veeler, is a hybrid interactive performance in two parts: a durational BDSM display during the opening of Compersion, a solo exhibition by Maya Fuhr, and a two channel video installation composed of documentation from the scene sourced from viewers, which will be exhibited as part of the Lifelike group exhibition at Vellum LA. The performance produced a negative latex cast of the subject’s body which will remain in the gallery for the duration of Compersion until it is reinstalled at Vellum. The work reflects on experience flattened for screens and measured in impressions, and the precarity of digital representation for trans people and sex workers.

Crowd-sourcing documentation requires that the performers watch themselves being watched, thus enlisting the encapsulated gaze of the viewer as a character in the scene. Online, impressions are anonymous. Your sight is captured in discrete granules and translated to machine-readable formats, which determine the market value of images in the content economy. Information is encoded in bits. Memory is unencodable. In the process of creating the video, we convert this information to memory. As invisible people watch you, so too does the algorithm. Impressions invites viewers to embody the human gaze which typically remains anonymous, and personally gather the data which tech platforms harvest autonomously.

Artist Bio

Sammie Veeler is an artist and curator based in Los Angeles. Her work takes the shape of undulating loops in time playing out across performance, digital media, world building, and prose. She to examines the spiritual and transformative power of personal and collective digital archives by connecting her personal practice preserving her late husband’s personal data to the collective production of history online.

Fix is a mixed-media artist and a professional dominatrix based in Los Angeles. They recontextualize and document formal rituals of BDSM and fetish, challenging the division between art and porn through performance, sculpture, and video installation. Their work inhabits the boundary between art and eroticism, transmuting their experience as a sex worker and reconstituting the hyperspecific conditions which eroticize ordinary scenarios.