Here's a Body: Get Over It

    /24-7PressRelease/ - LETHBRIDGE, AB, CANADA, March 01, 2006 - That is the essence of Tasha Diamant's Human Body Project 44, the first of a series of annual events taking place in Lethbridge, Alberta, on March 25. This is interactive performance art at a very basic level. Eschewing the opacity and gimmickry often associated with contemporary art, Human Body Project 44 gets right to the point. "If you decide to participate, you're coming to look at a 44-year-old naked woman: me," says Diamant of her groundbreaking project. "And I'm going to be looking back at you—but I'm not doing any sort of act and I am sure no sex object. I want to create a deeply emotional experience, one in which we are forced to face uncomfortable issues like vulnerability and body image head-on."

For Human Body Project 44, the artist will stand naked in a Lethbridge studio. More than just viewers or spectators, participants will visit "self-expression stations" where they can mediate their feelings by drawing, painting, taking photos, writing or speaking into a microphone. Other than this, the event will be carried out in silence. Diamant also has collaborators who will videotape and photograph the entire event.

Human Body Project 44 is the inauguration of Diamant's larger, lifelong planned series, Human Body Project. Human Body Project, in Diamant's conception, is partly the chronicle of a body as it changes over time, with Diamant standing in as the representative human at a Human Body Project event every year until her death. Compilations of the creative works resulting from the yearly Human Body Project events, numbered for Diamant's age, will be posted on her website, humanbodyproject.com. This will include video works, photography by participants and collaborators, and drawings and writings by participants. It will also include works created by Diamant, a longtime painter with pieces in hundreds of corporate and personal collections. Eventually, she plans to compile the work into a book. She also plans to exhibit Human Body Project material between annual events.

"I am interested in how we tiptoe around what is real, especially on an emotional level," says Diamant. "What will it be like to be in a room with a person who is inviting you to examine her imperfection and frailty? Challenging but humanizing for all of us. This is a way to experience our own humanity, which is, at its most fundamental, being in a body."

Adds Diamant: "I'm hoping to offer a more honest way to deal with the fragility of our physicality. Here's a body—you've got one, too. Get over it. Get into it."

For more information about this interactive project, visit http://www.humanbodyproject.com or contact Tasha Diamant at 403.380.6473.

A graduate of Queen's University and a former editor at Maclean's magazine, Tasha Diamant is an untrained artist who began painting in her late 20s. Since leaving a full-time journalism career to focus on art in 1992, Tasha has lived in Toronto, Calgary, Massachusetts, and Louisiana. She has also traveled and painted en plein air in Greece, Mexico, Turkey, Venice, Australia, New York City, New Brunswick and Alberta. Over the years, she has continued to freelance as a writer. She has also taught art and yoga at the largest holistic health facilities in the United States, Kripalu Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, and the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY. She now teaches public speaking at the Lethbridge Community College.

# # #