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Gilding The Lily - 7 Channel Audio Video Installation | 2013
Gilding the Lily is a confrontational, ritualistic, and absurd multi-channel audio/video installation that mediates the performance of various personas by further queering an existing queered body. Defined by Urban Dictionary as a euphemism for female masterbation, Gilding the Lily first appeared as a bastardization of the line 'To gild refined gold, to paint the lily', from William Shakespeare's 'King John'. This work is a self portrait that celebrates and critiques excessiveness through fantastical post humanist conceptions of reality. The collection of characters in this work are culled from parallel universes, much like daemons or avatars, whose voices merge and intermingle as entrapped splinters of a singular consciousness. Gilding the Lily is a series of portals into kitschy mythical worlds, reminiscent of Maleficent's mirror in Sleeping Beauty, that explore a range of femininity to masculinity and extend into realms of animal/human hybrids, child-vampire drag queens, divine swamp mutants, and mystical deities. These characters exhibit a desire to be a polymorphous body with endless forms and incarnations through a post singularity extension of humanity and gender expression. These concepts are inspired by Walter Jon Williams's novel 'Aristoi', the work of Genesis P-Orridge, Charles Fréger, Kenneth Anger, Pierre et Gilles, Pyuupiru, James Bidgood, Leigh Bowery, Jack Smith, the Cockettes and countless others. Gilding the Lily is a continuation of interests in the ubiquitous nature of excess in culture, camp's attack on the present via the detritus of the past, the permeability of space-time, forms of masculinity, gender performativity, and a blurring of mismatched sexual fetishes.
http://www.mixnyc.org/26/installations/
http://millergallery.cfa.cmu.edu/exhibitions/mfa2013/
Gilding the Lily is a confrontational, ritualistic, and absurd multi-channel audio/video installation that mediates the performance of various personas by further queering an existing queered body. Defined by Urban Dictionary as a euphemism for female masterbation, Gilding the Lily first appeared as a bastardization of the line 'To gild refined gold, to paint the lily', from William Shakespeare's 'King John'. This work is a self portrait that celebrates and critiques excessiveness through fantastical post humanist conceptions of reality. The collection of characters in this work are culled from parallel universes, much like daemons or avatars, whose voices merge and intermingle as entrapped splinters of a singular consciousness. Gilding the Lily is a series of portals into kitschy mythical worlds, reminiscent of Maleficent's mirror in Sleeping Beauty, that explore a range of femininity to masculinity and extend into realms of animal/human hybrids, child-vampire drag queens, divine swamp mutants, and mystical deities. These characters exhibit a desire to be a polymorphous body with endless forms and incarnations through a post singularity extension of humanity and gender expression. These concepts are inspired by Walter Jon Williams's novel 'Aristoi', the work of Genesis P-Orridge, Charles Fréger, Kenneth Anger, Pierre et Gilles, Pyuupiru, James Bidgood, Leigh Bowery, Jack Smith, the Cockettes and countless others. Gilding the Lily is a continuation of interests in the ubiquitous nature of excess in culture, camp's attack on the present via the detritus of the past, the permeability of space-time, forms of masculinity, gender performativity, and a blurring of mismatched sexual fetishes.
http://www.mixnyc.org/26/installations/
http://millergallery.cfa.cmu.edu/exhibitions/mfa2013/