Automated Carnalities is a show I co-created with Melissa Andolfato, exhibited in the List Art Building in October 2022. Some of the work exhibited here was reconfigured for an installation piece later that year.
Artist’s Statement: "How do we know what we want? Is it just animal instinct? Neurobiological triggers? Psychic complexes? Transcendent romantic narratives? Advertising?
Perhaps desire itself is the trap, an impossible pleasure dangled above our heads like a carrot by Don Draper and the capitalist machine to sell more sportscars. Or maybe want itself is our savior, a compulsion to make a better world, a lattice of connections and organization waiting to be catalyzed when enough people want the same thing.
To be trans is to be entangled in a bio-cultural morass of wants, needs, and essentialism. Was I Born This Way or am I expressing bodily autonomy? Is my dick my capital-P Phallus or something to slice off with the panache of a radical feminist freeing the nipple, or both? Caught up in endless spirals about authenticity, choice, and nature, I spill words onto my Twitter feed, grasping at personhood with the confessional. However, does self-externalization through technology give one a triumphant cyborg complexity, or is it just another (commodity) fetish, an ironic substitute for biological fullness?
In these works I explore the ways desire is constructed, routed, extracted, erased, and sold back to us, the aesthetics therein, and the worlds desire might build or destroy on the way."
kolya shields 