Entry Title: " Death of an Icon"
Name: Tiffany Trenda, United States
Category: Professional, Performance


Entry Description:

Trenda edited the music video, "Express Yourself" by Madonna. She took out all of the images of Madonna and projected them onto a screen. She memorized the choreography. During the dance, a shot rings out and she lies dead on the floor of the gallery for 3 hours. Part of the performance was audience participation, which included the viewer to take photos and film her while she was dead. We create our own icons to become an imaginative inhuman machine of society. As soon as the icon shows fragility, we kill them in the media. We kill our own icons.

Tiffany Trenda's work is an investigation of how human being is defined and redefined through the integration of technology. She questions how the machine has become an intrinsic part of the body and how that inorganic/organic material fused together as a digital collage. Her central process is to take technology (LCDs, video projectors, cameras, etc.) and create a digital environment with an embodied performance that simulates the human psyche inside the digital world. The viewer is experimenting almost physically how the psyche evolves to relate and survive within the machine. Tiffany Trenda is a video installation performance artist that was born in 1979. She received her bfa from Art Center College of Design and is now based out of Malibu, CA. Her work has been exhibited at Photo Los Angeles, Korean Cultural Center LA, Track 16, Photo San Francisco, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Trenda won Artist of the Year 2008 at the London Creative Awards and later became the shortlist winner of 2009. She is currently finishing her graduate degree at the University of California Los Angeles, Design and Media Arts.