Artist Statement
Naomi Even-Aberle is a multi-disciplinary artist living in South Dakota who uses performance art, digital technology, and martial arts practices to explore female roles in contemporary society. Even-Aberle's solo and community art practice involves performative elements, interdisciplinary media processes such as sound, video, projection, and are embedded within her martial arts philosophy of understanding and establishing learning strategies for the body, mind, and spirit. Throughout her artistic explorations, Even-Aberle has utilized and experimented with various media and forms making use of the media that best fits the subject matter, content, themes, and collaborations.
In the past two years, Even-Aberle has moved away from a skill and medium based approach and instead embraced a conceptual and research-based approach which brings together her martial arts community building practices and her personal artistic practices. Both practices address public and social practice, inherited histories, and the physical and emotional states of the contemporary body and identity. Even-Aberle explores the body as a site for action, conflict, power, and resistance; working to navigate a third space between personal and communal. This body appears in the work through methods of masking, personating, costuming, and manipulation of the site which calls attention to tension and social understanding of both personal histories and identities, but also inherited social and cultural histories. This avenue asks the viewer to see both histories as present in the physical body simultaneously and to question how one considers both as a transformative element.
Naomi Even-Aberle is a multi-disciplinary artist living in South Dakota who uses performance art, digital technology, and martial arts practices to explore female roles in contemporary society. Even-Aberle's solo and community art practice involves performative elements, interdisciplinary media processes such as sound, video, projection, and are embedded within her martial arts philosophy of understanding and establishing learning strategies for the body, mind, and spirit. Throughout her artistic explorations, Even-Aberle has utilized and experimented with various media and forms making use of the media that best fits the subject matter, content, themes, and collaborations.
In the past two years, Even-Aberle has moved away from a skill and medium based approach and instead embraced a conceptual and research-based approach which brings together her martial arts community building practices and her personal artistic practices. Both practices address public and social practice, inherited histories, and the physical and emotional states of the contemporary body and identity. Even-Aberle explores the body as a site for action, conflict, power, and resistance; working to navigate a third space between personal and communal. This body appears in the work through methods of masking, personating, costuming, and manipulation of the site which calls attention to tension and social understanding of both personal histories and identities, but also inherited social and cultural histories. This avenue asks the viewer to see both histories as present in the physical body simultaneously and to question how one considers both as a transformative element.