Sophia Oppel
February 24th-March 22nd
As biometric capture and datafication are increasingly required to access our digitized
surround, bodies are rendered knowable and transparent by corporate entities.
Autoscopy continues Oppel’s investigation into the implications of bodily transparency
and the hostile affirmation leveraged by late-stage capitalism. Autoscopy is a spatial
video installation, coalescing around a terminal built to replicate the shape of a
commercial 3D scanning booth, and affixed with laser-cut 2-way mirror. The projected
imagery of two videos refract through this mirrored enclosure, oscillating between
portrayals of a body as a faulty collection of 3D scans and CGI anatomical models in
varying states of layered visibility. In a narrative voice-over that merges intimate poesis
with body horror, the process of being 3D scanned is described as erotic, invasive, and
yet depersonalizing. The exhibition will be accompanied by a text written by Talia Golland.
Sophia Oppel is an interdisciplinary arts practitioner and researcher interested in
examining digital interfaces as sites of capitalist power and extraction; Oppel’s work
interrogates complicity with, and refusal of, biometric capture on a bodily scale. Oppel
received a Masters of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto in 2021, and is
based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Oppel received her BFA from OCAD University in 2018, and
has exhibited locally, including shows at InterAccess, Gallery TPW, the plumb, Hearth,
Crutch CAC, Queen Specific, Bunker 2, Forest City Gallery, and Xpace Cultural Center,
and internationally, including Supermarket Art Fair in Stockholm, Sweden.