NOW TENDER, NOW FIERCE

Now Tender, Now Fierce is a self-referential work. The images and voice-over of the piece reflect my morbid attraction to the concept of celebrity, the male form, and how a persona is constructed. Fascinated with Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona and the cycle of desire theorized by the post-structuralist French philosopher Jacques Lacan, I attempted to engage the subconscious in my creative process. Harnessing my subconscious as a source for material, I wrote a poetic narrative inspired by sordid paintings of meat by Rembrandt van Rijn and Francis Bacon, Julia Kristeva’s essay on abjection, “Powers of Horror,” celebrity home videos featuring Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Paul Newman, and Lydia Moyer’s video art piece about the harrowing story of the Jonestown massacre, Jonestown.

Aesthetically, the narrative is an experimental take on the documentary style, which makes use of primary sources and archival photograph and video fragments. The images fold in on one another kaleidoscopically, imbuing the piece with a scopophilic homoeroticism. The piece appropriates male cultural icons as both figures of my personal obsession and existential figments of a greater pop culture order. Pulsating with elements of carnival, flesh, bestiality, the voiceover and visuals also expose moments of perverse attraction.

Gallery: Under The Subway Gallery at PS1
Year: 2012