We usually understand ‘desire’ in terms of simple consumerist frameworks. However desire drives and inspires us; pushes us to deconstruct and obsess. Desire forms us as creative entities. The desire of ideas, concepts, materials, and methods can drive projects into unpredictable and profound territories.
Tichacek is held in thrall by the exaggerated phantasmic mirror of her own beauty: Amanda Lepore. A hybrid love-object – for whom sex is the pure, scintillating appearance of superimposed signs of desire – Lepore is delivered, like Freddy Kruger, from the dreamer’s unconscious. Although Tichacek is the dreamer and the artist, her dream (this combination of memory and disavowed desire in art) is stronger and more supple than she is. Lepore moves and even looks like a puppet but it’s Tichacek who is actually the doll manipulated by her imaginary double, with her limbs, back and neck braced in severe prosthetic supports as if her bones could break apart like soft chalk. Like the creations of those mad sciences that strive to surpass nature and natural morality – eugenics, vivisection, mesmerism – this is an art that induces an unnatural beauty, captivating in its alien artifice, and both less and more than human.
Justin Shoulder is an artist working in performance, sculpture, video and nightlife/community events production. His main body of work the ‘Fantastic Creatures’ are invented alter-personas based on queered ancestral mythologies. These creatures are embodied through hand crafted costumes and prosthesis and animated by their own gestural languages. Shoulder uses his body and craft to forge connections between queer, migrant, spiritual and intercultural experiences.
He has performed and exhibited internationally, recent highlights include: The River Eats at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Ex Nilalang for The Asia Pacific Triennial at Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art 2015-16, Brisbane, the annual costume ball he co-produces Monsta Gras at the Red Rattler Sydney and SFW by Forward Assembly Hong Kong 2016.
He is currently working on a film new commission for the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing arts Melbourne 2017 in collaboration with artist Bhenji Ra and a new experimental theatre work with international premiere in Sydney, October 2017.
Gilles Deleuze, on desire.