Kathleen Pickavance is a Swiss-Canadian artist and filmmaker working with self-portraiture, femininity, doubling, and the uncanny. Her films portray personas with masks, makeup, mannequins, and repetition, blurring the boundaries between human and artificial, subject and object. Through these figures, she examines the performance of femininity, how it is enacted, exaggerated, and shaped through modes of looking.
Her films are installed in dialogue with their content, using varied formats such as small-scale theaters, large projections, and constrained viewing devices such as peepholes that force the viewer to question their physical position, their gaze, and their role as observer.
Drawn to the bizarre, she creates personas wandering through worlds of the weird, the hysterical, and ordinary routine. Bold colors, artificial settings, and theatrical gestures define her visual language. Her work is informed by a burlesque sensibility and a Lynchian-like universe, where humor, discomfort, and strangeness coexist.