Artist Statement & Biography

Paul Lofeodo’s interdisciplinary practice is broadly concerned with the role of normative systems and their accompanying circuits of power in the formation and delineation of the Self. Through a research-based approach, he examines how subjectivity is formed and controlled in and through relationships and the embedding of the individual in symbolic systems.

Based in photography, sculpture, space and text Lofeodo’s heavily referential work often makes use of large-format photography and compositing in tableau-style studio photographs, post-minimalist plywood constructions, strategies of reenactment and repetition to examine the ways in which bodies have been subjected to force and violence, manipulated or made into tools of institutional power. Lofeodo applies a dramaturgical and psychoanalytical perspective to organised violence, the symbolic organization of intimacy, and how the two can overlap.

Concerned with how subjects form themselves through and against normative systems, Lofeodo’s work is permeated by a discrete queer logic which (re)thinks the subject’s position(s) in normative systems and their enactment of power as multivalent, uncertain, terrifying and transcendant.

Paul Lofeodo was born in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada in 1994. He received his BFA from Concordia university where he studied Fine Art Photography and Sociology, he currently lives and practices in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal where he also works as a cultural worker and writer.

He has previously exhibited in groupe shows including for the Art Matters festival (Body Works, 2017), Somewhere Gallery (Mementos of Self, 2020) and the Rad Hourani Foundation (WE, 2021). Lofeodo recently opened his first solo exhibition at the Maison de la culture Côte-des-Neiges (Arrière-fond, 2023).

Contact

email: paul.lofeodo@gmail.com

instagram: @paul_lofeodo

Reference Artists

Joseph Beuys

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin

Sorel Cohen

Samuel Fosso

Leon Golub

Eikoh Hosoe

Alfredo Jaar

Jannis Kounellis

Suzy Lake

Man Ray

David Milne

Édouard Manet

Zeami Motokiyo

Collier Schorr

Raoul Ubac

Bibliography

Berger, John — Ways of Seeing

Brecht, Bertolt — Brecht on Theatre

Breton, André — Manifeste du surréalisme

Derrida, Jacques — Spectres de Marx

Epstein, Charlotte — Surveillance, Privacy and the Making of the Modern Subject

Faure, Bernard — The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism

Foucault, Michel — The History of Sexuality (vol. 1)

Freud, Sigmund — Negation

Fricker, Miranda — Epistemic Injustice: Power and Ethics of Knowing

Hall, Stuart — Encoding, Decoding

Komparu, Kunio — The Noh Theatre: Principles and Perspectives

Motokiyo, Zeami — The Spirit of Noh: A New Translation of the Classic Noh Treatise the Fushikaden