During my residency at East Street Arts, I staged a form of personal world-building around calisthenics - a discipline which comes from the Greek words for 'strength' and 'beauty'. This etymological spine allowed me to construct a creative framework of ritualised spectatorship, desire and spatial performance.
Re-imagining Wilde's classical eros through a sapphic lens, I aimed to recreate the sacred triangle of artist, muse and spectator. The muses of the Museum painting summon the artist/athlete in Bar Dance, and the spectator witnesses the ritual.
In calisthenics parks all over the country, athletes perform modern rites of agon - discipline, rivalry and spectacle. I wanted to design an architecture that felt native to this blend of urban antiquity. This led to the design of the Cool S Colonnade - swapping the volute of the ionic column with the Cool S - as both surprisingly conform to the golden mean (see below).
Imagining myself as a kouros I offered myself to the muse through an act of worship through will. Desire imagines strength, and strength makes desire real. The mute, frontal stasis of the kouros is animated through vertical, serpentine oscillation. The colonnade becomes a temple and training ground, the site of aesthetic elevation and bodily ritual, a shrine of desire.
Museum similarly folds together the language of antiquity and modernity - drawing a parallel between the mise-en-abyme of 17th century gallery painting and Instagram's hall-of-mirrors, embedding the viewer in a world of devotional looking.
Museum (2022)
Oil on canvas, ink on sticker print
120 x 90cm
Bar Dance with Cool S Colonnade (2022)
Live performance with sculptural installation and music; polystyrene, metal rig, spray paint. 3 minutes 3 seconds
Size: 153 W x 171 H x 2160 D cm
Photo by Mahshid Alavi
Cool S Colonnade drawing (2022)
Pencil on paper