Maggie Wong
Maggie Wong is a multimedia artist working from the unceded, ancestral, and traditional land of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish Nations. Wong is an aspiring femme-fatale - she engages performativity and the body. Placing herself at an intersection of feminism, queer subjecthood, and identity, Wong seeks to challenge the dynamics in eroticsim and fetishism.
Matryoshka Through the Dark Glass, 2020
video, 00:04:12
Taking on the aesthetics of a camgirl, Matryoshka Through the Dark Glass questions the concepts around identity, exploitation, and objectification. While investigating different acts of agency, personal desire, and notions of femininity, the video explores the act of identity fabrication in the age of the Internet. As digital personas, especially in the field of fetish or sex work, are often seen as extensions of the “IRL” individual, the common consumer blurs the boundaries between the individual and their constructed identity. The utilization of direct but impersonal communications channels such as Omegle or Chatroulette highlights the imbalance between the camera’s persona and its anonymous viewer, and by extension stresses the power dynamics between the two parties.
“Palimpsest”, 2020
video, 00:02:14
Working with video sur-impression, “Palimpsest” borrows its name from scrapped manuscripts pages reused to convey new information while simultaneously carrying the ghost of its erased predecessor. Wong adds her own twist onto the idea of reimpression to open a dialogue on the notion of translation and circulation of knowledge. “Palimpsest” is a work about juxtaposition in its subject and construction. Examining the differing constructs of femininity and feminism between the cultures, the work investigates and challenges the complications as well as the collisions between diasporic ideas of identity and agency. The artist mentions as well how imitation, translation and resistance play in the loss and preservation of a non-dominant voice.