I was dating this guy and he was dumb and very cute. You wouldn’t think he was dumb, he literally worked at NASA as a programmer or something. His roommate was a woman and an engineer who he often talked about in a really negative way. One day he was just roasting this girl, talking about how she was gross and her bag was ugly and dirty for some reason. I responded, “Why are you talking so badly about her? You’re being mean for no reason!” And he was like... “I KNOW THAT YOU THINK THAT I THINK THAT YOU’RE A DUMB BIMBO, BUT I DON'T, I THINK YOU’RE SMARTER THAN HER!!” This comment offers a laughable distillation of the frightening experience of the filtration of male perspective of both who I am, and who I might think I am. When we perform selfhood emotion how much of it comes from what we’ve actually experienced or felt? How much comes from the culture we’ve consumed our whole lives? Are we just collages of our consumption? Where do I end and where does culture begin in or my perception/ performance of self, identity, and emotion? These are the questions presented and never answered by the works in I Know That You Think That I Think. My subjects are white women (and one man) expressing heightened “hysterical” emotions from reality television, film, and art history. I’m interested in the identification and decontextualization of that moment when the figure hits the crescendo of drama, the height of emotion. These works are about the line between the real and the performed, the constant movement between representation and reality. The videos I create digitally push, pull, and stretch the faces and gestures of my subjects to further isolate and intensify that seed of their performative emotion to its most brutal capacity. I manipulate and morph their expressions to take their pain, fear, fury, agony, and anger to a state that moves between plausible physicality and monstrous fiction. I translate these digital animations through a process of charcoal drawing that pulls the image further away from the original context. It is an added layer of mediation that removes the soul from the image of the physical body leaving an empty vessel for myself and the viewer to fill with their subjective experience. This cumulative dissociation from fixed meaning is achieved through layers of digital and physical manipulation, decontextualization, and conceptual intervention that indicates the fragility of the human image in visual culture. Where does her actual self or her true expression end and where do the layers of representation and digital manipulation begin? The oscillation between reality and fabrication in these works reveals how susceptible our images are to the outside influence of those who author them. Even as we author or perform our own emotions and selfhood, the knowledge of outside surveillance and the cultural constructs we consume inevitably cloud our access to authenticity or the fallacy of a fixed “self.” —CK /// CASEY KAUFFMANN IS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTIST WORKING IN DRAWING, INSTALLATION, VIDEO, AND A VARIETY OF DIGITAL MEDIUMS. SHE IS A LECTURER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO. KAUFFMANN WAS BORN IN THE SAN FERNANDO VALLEY IN LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA IN 1989. SHE LIVES AND WORKS IN LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, AND RECEIVED HER MFA FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA IN 2020 AND HER BACHELOR OF ARTS FROM THE EVERGREEN STATE COLLEGE IN OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON. SHE HAS EXHIBITED HER WORK NATIONALLY AND INTERNATIONALLY WITH ORGANIZATIONS AND GALLERIES SUCH AS TIMES SQUARE ARTS, SYNTHESIS GALLERY, TRANSFER GALLERY, HUMAN RESOURCES, LYLES AND KING, COAXIAL, AREBYTE, CIRRUS, AND WILL BE INCLUDED IN THE FORTHCOMING LACMA PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 2024 EXHIBITION. HER WORK HAS BEEN FEATURED IN PUBLICATIONS SUCH AS THE NEW YORKER, I-D, VICE, HYPERALLERGIC, ARTNET, ARTILLERY, AND LAWEEKLY. KAUFFMANN’S COLLAGE INSTAGRAM PROJECT @UNCANNYSFVALLEY, WHICH SHE STARTED IN 2014, FEATURES DIGITAL COLLAGE WORKS AND GIFS CREATED USING ONLY HER IPHONE. THE PIECES KAUFFMANN POSTS TO THIS ACCOUNT ARE AN EVER-ACCUMULATING COLLECTION OF MATERIAL FROM ALL CORNERS OF THE INTERNET, SOURCED FROM TUMBLR, INSTAGRAM, AND GOOGLE. THIS INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT AND BODY OF WORK HAVE BEEN EXHIBITED IN MANY GALLERIES, WRITTEN ABOUT IN SEVERAL ESTEEMED PUBLICATIONS, AND LED TO HER ADMISSION TO THE MFA PROGRAM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. KAUFFMANN’S DRAWING PRACTICE FUNCTIONS AS AN INQUIRY INTO THE REPRESENTATION OF FEMME EMOTION AND HYSTERIA IN BOTH ART HISTORY AND POPULAR CULTURE. GALLERY SADE LOS ANGELES PRESENTS CASEY KAUFFMANN // I KNOW THAT YOU THINK THAT I THINK WITH AN OPENING RECEPTION ON FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6TH, 2024 FROM 7-11PM. THE WORKS WILL BE ON VIEW EVERY SUNDAY FROM 1-6PM AND BY APPOINTMENT AT ALL OTHER TIMES UNTIL SEPTEMBER 22ND. GALLERY SADE LOS ANGELES IS LOCATED AT 204 S AVENUE 19, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.