Blue Dark and in the Shape of Me (ONGOING)

Blue Dark and In the Shape of Me
2025
An Essay Film

Screenshots from the essay film Blue Dark and in The Shape of Me, this project is an extended cut of the live performance A Yawn, A Scream, An Endless Opening of the Mouth (2025). Blue Dark and in the Shape of Me is a video performance installation using luminosity, screen, glass, and the body as a sight of seductive, desirous grief.

Its impetus began with this question: where do we go when we are denied our humanity – what do we become? The works follow a lineage of anamorphosis, a visual technique that prioritizes the distorted image represented in a picture when seen from a specific vantage point that if viewed from a particular angle, or reflected in a curved mirror appears ‘normal.’ This distortion is paired with principles of image reproducibility, particularly how an image transforms when it is doubled again and again and again.

My obsession with the distorted image acts in tandem with my obsession with the construct of humanity — that one's humanity is contingent on a set of rules, that if you can be ‘dehumanized’ there must also be a ‘humanizing.’ We must become human. When paired with conversations around the surveillance of blackness, the distorted image becomes a vehicle to explore the imposed luminosity of the black body as a form of violent hypervisibility and a potential form of resistance. Using my drag persona, Dainty Funk, as a stand-in for black luminosity, I seek to address the consequences of a gendered, racist, networked panopticon and how we are recruited to watch one another.

I am concerned with the non-white, the UN-gendered, the disfigured and disabled, the lost, the lonely, the living and dead and the way the world surveils us all.

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