Jess Loseby's works are like lessons from a home economics version of The Art of War. And what her strategy considers, is the difficult relationship between the domestic (i.e. the home) and the undomestic (i.e. the "wild" outside world of digital technology, industry, media and politics). Within this context, her work explores an economy of mediated difference and representation - that is, of identity, where its registration (its signature) is floating in the interstices of conflicting worlds.

Her pieces layer together, in movement, iconic representations of these two worlds in apparent confrontation with each other. But the contextual frame wherein the conflict does occur, exhibits also common interest, indicating a desire for these different worlds to come together to develop their relationship.

This shows itself in the game-like structure of some of her work (including Position/Disposition), where the game has no apparent aspect of competition. They are like children's pattern games, but they use social patterns as much as graphic ones. And the player's usual control is questioned, while exposing a complicity in the choices that they make and the patterns they set up. They are therefore just as responsible for the interstitial tensions, and their unraveling, as the artist/game designer is.

Indeed, Jess Loseby's attention to the liminal - to borderlines and seams - with an eye to their beauty, (beautiful seams) marks a displacement of an inside/outside dialectic governing the conventional economy of difference. For that beauty (aesthetic) operates in the spirit of a subtle seduction, where the work is intended, as she puts it, "to get under your skin." It incorporates thus, the intrusive function of the enticingly cool and serious digital world, while inoculating itself against its hegemony by mixing it with the alluring warmth and levity, (whimsy, she might say), of the domestic home.

This has an interesting effect, for the tension between the two contrasts inform and displace each other's characteristic force. It's like a wolf who wears a sheep's skin coat thus becoming more a sheep, or a sheep who wears a wolf skin cap thus becoming more a wolf. So then likewise, the audience is both influenced and influential in the setting of the patterns of difference and for its ordinance with regard to different surveillance forms: watching for interest or care, for participation or collaboration, and for construction or control.

If the installation is a subset of the exhibition then it elaborates the movement signified graphically in the title Net:Reality as a movement from the virtual (digital) to the actual (domestic). Position/Disposition qualifies this movement, (signs it), as an either/or choice (as though between reason and passion). But it shows the choice is not clear cut, because the Position (here? there? in?) is always influenced by a disposition (control?), and the power of the choice (control?) is displaced by switching the position of the chooser. Who exactly owns control then becomes itself a position difficult to hold on to.

[ domestic:undomestic, Michael John Boyce ]