Tinder Lucida provides an archive of images produced as part of my three year social media project that took place on my personal Facebook page. I began regularly capturing mobile phone selfies posing as various personas, employing the Tinder dating app interface, and then sharing them as status updates. Originally, I set out with the intention of comedy, and I enjoyed making people laugh. Unfortunately, part way through the project, a traumatic incident prompted me to take another turn. This photobook documents a range of approaches I employed to interrogate the complexities of our selves entangled in a digital age dating culture, via the selfie. All images were produced using my mobile phone camera.
Tinder Lucida (the book) is $25 plus shipping in AUD.
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"Gomersall's practice appears, at first, like an endless flow of ephemera: selfies, captions, comments and screenshots. Teaming lo-fi images with casual captions, biting insights and bewildered audience comments, her practice confuses the boundaries of art and everyday life, prompting the enlightened audience member (those reading these online excursions as art) to question: what can we really know, if anything, about Catherine Gomersall? And what can this tell us more broadly about identity, community and love (or the search for love) in the age of the internet?
Framed by artwork titles (in the gallery or via her artist website), her work snaps back into a familiar artistic shape, revealing Gomersall's online ventures as carefully planned and articulated projects. For The Tinder Project (2017), Gomersall shares screenshots from her Tinder explorations to Facebook and Instagram. Combining shameless selfies with cringeworthy bios, Gomersall riffs on the instabilities and cliches of existing while mid-30s, single and female in 2018. Via the Facebook version, we ride the rollercoaster of online comment sections: joy, smut, smuggery and minsunderstanding play out alongside her images.
In Artificial Hells, Claire Bishop articulates a difference between primary and secondary audiences, between those who experience participatory or theatrical artworks for themselves and those who only experience an impoverished account, via documentation, after the fact. Gomersall's practice collapses this heirarchy, enabling the viewing of her practice as primary (via Facebook) or secondary (via her website) audience, or flipping between the two as easily as one switches between internet tabs. Bishop asks, in the age of social media, what are the differences between art and social networking? Gomersall replies everything and nothing."
Dr Katherine Moline and Dr Louise Mayhew - from their write up on @selfies_and_social_activism on Instagram.