Landscape is my Sir: performing a confluence of perversity, nature and kitsch
Date
2019
Authors
SolĂs, Migueltzinta C.
University of Lethbridge. Faculty of Fine Arts
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Department of Art
Abstract
This body of work and research aims to construct a cosmology of desire and perversity, which functions to unsettle existing narratives of power and landscape. A composite immersive experience built of performances, installations, videos and weavings, the work performs a collision of rural, colonial and queer imaginaries. Through this coupling of imaginaries, I unpack ideas of land and gender, western expansion and the imaging of colonially occupied territory. The work creates new visual languages with which to better comprehend cultural hybridity and the queering and unsettling of rural cultural paradigms. Using built and found sites, the work introduces a performance persona, Chico California, a homosexual leatherman seeking to engage in erotic relationships with space, site and inanimate objects. Chico California, a mysterious semi-feral misanthrope, makes his provocative, problematic and un-procreative advances on Nature and Landscape discoverable, presenting the onlooker with opportunities to encounter him in his habits of desire.
Description
Keywords
Landscape , Perversity , Belonging , Installation , Performance , Unbelonging , Mestizaje , Hybridity , Leather , Fetish , Trans Art , Transgender , Sexuality , California , Queer , Indigenous Science , Kitsch , Land , Site Specific , Desire , Distance , Grindr , Masculinity , Performance Art , Camouflage , Post-Colonial , colonial , Imaginaries , Western , Leatherman , BDSM , Experimental Media , Dissertations, Academic