Dorit Cypis

[9] Counter to much feminist work of the time, Cypis focused on interiority and personal mythologies rather than exterior political realms, and according to art historian Elizabeth Armstrong, made a significant contribution to discourse about the representation of women and female sexuality.

[19][20] In 1977, she completed an MFA at Cal Arts, whose faculty at the time included Michael Asher and John Baldessari;[17][21][22] among her early work was the feminist performative video, Exploring Comfort.

[2][32] Critics aligned the strategies of Cypis's early work (e.g., In Quest of the Impresario: Courage, 1982) with feminist artists such as Barbara Kruger and Dara Birnbaum, who sought to unmask and disrupt patriarchal systems of viewing and representation.

[26][33] By the mid-1980s, however, she moved beyond appropriation and pastiche to a deeper psychophysical engagement with the female body, representation and sexual identity, confronting social conventions with strategies of provocation, defamiliarization and stream-of-conscious association.

[10] In multi-slide and sound pieces including Love After Death (1986), Cypis overlaid emotionally and psychologically loaded imagery—erotic photographs, borrowings from media, medicine, religion and Renaissance painting, haunting family snapshots, exotic travel slides—to create phantasmagoric installations that engulfed performers and spectators in a fluctuating tableau of audio and visual stimuli.

[37][38][39] Rather than re-invoke dominant cultural tropes, her imagery suggested multiple, equivalent meanings, role reversals involving gender and agency, and a concept of "self" extending beyond one's body and lifetime to other generations and the collective unconscious (e.g., Lucy and the Vampire; A Sacred Prostitute (one in herself), 1990).

[18][47] For The Body in the Picture (1993), Cypis photographed participants physically interacting with projected autobiographical and media images that they chose; The Boston Globe deemed them "psychophotos—the capturing of the mind on emulsion.

[50][51] Other works used recurrent elements—mirrors and tactile, highly associative materials like feathers, raw sheep fleece and plywood—to create visually disorienting, ambiguous spaces and engage the body on social, psychological and phenomenological levels.

[3][52] The installations Out of Time (1998–2000) and Angel of Histories (2000) explored movement, ephemerality, mortality and human form, reproducing spectators' reflections through distorting mirrors, video feeds and scales that placed them both inside and outside the work.

[3][53] The Prisoner's Dilemma series examined disempowerment in situations of limited knowledge (its title referencing the well-known game theory/negotiation scenario); the images depict Cypis staring into a one-way mirror from inside the temporary jail of a California court, with reflective surfaces and architectural disruptions creating a dislocating, panopticon-like environment.

[3][53] In her The Rest in Motion photographs and video, Cypis suggests human presence and psychic states through absence, relying on the sensual qualities of a windblown, billowing curtain in an oceanside window whose rhythmic push and pull evokes breath, restlessness, and freedom.

[61][64] The Sighted See the Surface (2012–9)—a video installation, book, and body of subtle text prints that began as a memorial to mentor Michael Asher—weaves experiences over forty years, including 1970s Asher artwork, volunteer work at the Braille Institute for the Blind, and community-conflict dialogue facilitation.