Professor Melissa Ragona will speak on the virtual panel “Phantom Bodies: The Haptic Unhinged” on April 22 at 6:00 PM EDT. The panel, organized by The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, also features Angela Dufresne, Andrew Woolbright, Joiri Minaya, and Mala Iqbal.
“Phantom Bodies: The Haptic Unhinged” will address the contemporary shift within figurative painting which rejects the Western canonical fixation of depicting flesh through paint as a vehicle of desire and the gaze. The panelists will discuss this shift through the valences of affect theory, post-humanist theory, and phantom limbs, while discussing new figuration’s interest in avatars, sensuous bodies, spectrality, and virtual presence; attempting to evaluate it along its political and theoretical implications, limitations, and advantages.