BA Graduate Showcase
Glasgow School of Art
Stow Building
2 - 11 June 2023
For their 2023 BA Graduate Showcase the aritst presented a new body of work exploring potential post-human desires for becoming other, celebrated through material form and photographic montage. Together these works formed a multi-media installation, comprised of paintings, photographs, sculptural pieces and the visual and audible residues of a prior perfomance in the space, RHIP. In entering the space the viewer becomes immersed in a world that momentarily transports them to another time and place, meshed with material gestures and compositions that tickle the senses in strange and unfamiliar ways. To become other is to embrace a new found sense of belonging that at first may feel disorientating, but holds potential for regeneration and discovery.
This body of work is contextualised through the artist’s research project entitlted, Beautiful Monsters: An investigation into post-human dreaming, which examines a growing discourse amongst trans perfomrance artists emerging from a cross-section of post-human studies and queer theory.
The works displayed can all be seen as acts of dance, gestures inscribed onto an object and preserved in times as representations of bodily resistance. In the exhbit these acts of dance are preserved through thematerial forms of photographic paper, canvas, fabric, paint, hair, concrete, latex, silicon, sound waves, and the very infrastructure of the space itself. Through gestures of the body Ocean maps feeling and experience onto a surface, like scars on the skin, revealing a story or experience of past sruggles held and ultimately released through the body. The works remain as residues that hint to an experience, yet always fail to reveal itself in full luminosity. To enter the space is to sit with these echoes of an expereince and recontextualise ones relationaility to the world around them.
This photographic series pictures above forms a trilogy of stages in a process of becoming other. With each image serving as a snapshot into a different part of the journey to find a sense of euphoria through enacting desire. The central image, CUNT, a bold unapologetic thick pink glossy print, immediately confronts you when entering the void into the space. Suspended from the wall by metal brackets, framed by the markings from RHIP, and elevated above a stage holding the strewn props used to create the image, CUNT is composed as an alter. The euphoric climax of empowerment in transcending the confines of heteronormative humanist expectations.
The other images offer a different perspective into this alien barbie-eque transformation. The left hand image shows a messy reality in which the doll like form has fallen apart, taken after the failure to apply a prosthetic mask, leaving behind residual makeup blots. A story of both sexual fantasy and fetishism, the relationship to the camera is both delicate and intense and shares a sesitive vulnerabiloity with the audience. Whilst CUNT collages multiple images seamlessly to create a complete environment, the other two images leave some space to imagine. The final image reveals the green screen whilst also utilising a sense of magical realism by extending the backdrop to enhance its atomspheric quality. Showing the body stripped down to nude, we see a glimpse into the uncensored truth behind the artist. Asking the viewer, where does one go afterwards? When our bodies are constantly debated behind our back, commodified through social media and sexualised online, this last photograph aims to push the audience to care for the delicacy of the bodies we too inhabit.
The artist is critically concerned with matters of the body, asking, what is the signifcance of being in this body at this time? And how does material offer opportunties for expanding and pleasuring onself with feeling outside or at home within the body? Latex, Silicon and synthetic hair were materials that naturally suited these explorations. The paintings and sculptures exhibited are extensions of the artists body, like organs, skin, finger nails, hair, wigs, dresses and possessions. Inherently personal and precious through the nature of their consrcution, to create the works for Ocean is to become them, to wear it, and feel it like the enrgy used to create. They expand outside the body and are situated as bodily residues in the space that offer an intimate exhcnage with he artist, like scars on the skin asking to be noticed in their grotesque beauty.
The performance work RHIP, created prior to the exhibit worked to architecturally and visually messy the space. In return it produced a house that framed the artworks, and in unison the space becomes a portal into a queer world that allows the viewer to be transported from the context of the institutionalised space in which they were geogrpahically situated. To enter one is invited into curiosity, to become lost and removed from normaility, and open the senses to what to touch, hear or smell.
The residues of RHIP, the marks inscribed onto the floor walls and ceiling, and the echoes of the sound replayed through speakers in the space, hint to the meaning behind the marks. An act of resistance that refuses to reveal itself in full luminosity.
↓ CLICK IMAGE BELOW TO VIEW RHIP ↓