Paranoia Superstar, 2020 includes wearable sculptures Yōkai pumps and Yōkai mask, textual installation Remote control scrolls, and the titular two-channel video performance. This body of work was conceived and created during the height of Melbourne's COVID-19 restrictions. The pieces of the collection reflect the shaky and convoluted relationships of private and public actions (and of the body, screen and codified selfhood) which germinated within my artistic practice during this time of severe social isolation.
The Yōkai wearables were constructed as ritual objects for live performance: impermanent vessels
of precarity and unstable support structures for the body, which hold the potentiality for tragic
performativity in the dissolution of prosthetic material. In the Paranoia Superstar video, the
performing body attempts, trembling and stumbling, to scaffold itself with these pieces. As this
performance of tragedy is further disintegrated in the multi-streamed video format, fissures
of bodily integrity allow for a non-binary (or de-binarising) choreography to be assembled from the
artefacts of “failed” self-composition.
This work is re-narrated by the the installation objects Remote control scrolls, which bring my interest in archaeology (as a framework for bodily reconfiguration) into contexts of language and architectural space. Lines
of text, here like “subtitles” for the video piece, are repeated but obscured behind sedimented
traces of process, leaving no choice but to read between the lines of the surface. This action is one of
excavation – exhuming a re-configurative Superstar from the nonlinear metanarrative of queer
paranoia shaped by a network of screens, skins and detritus.
of precarity and unstable support structures for the body, which hold the potentiality for tragic
performativity in the dissolution of prosthetic material. In the Paranoia Superstar video, the
performing body attempts, trembling and stumbling, to scaffold itself with these pieces. As this
performance of tragedy is further disintegrated in the multi-streamed video format, fissures
of bodily integrity allow for a non-binary (or de-binarising) choreography to be assembled from the
artefacts of “failed” self-composition.
This work is re-narrated by the the installation objects Remote control scrolls, which bring my interest in archaeology (as a framework for bodily reconfiguration) into contexts of language and architectural space. Lines
of text, here like “subtitles” for the video piece, are repeated but obscured behind sedimented
traces of process, leaving no choice but to read between the lines of the surface. This action is one of
excavation – exhuming a re-configurative Superstar from the nonlinear metanarrative of queer
paranoia shaped by a network of screens, skins and detritus.
Install images courtesy of Wyndham Art Gallery (from the exhibition FLUID: Versatile Identities in the 21st Century, curated by Dr. Megan Evans and Lola-Mae Pink).
Also pictured: artworks by Nathan Beard and Ophelia Bakowski
