2018 – Quarental by Morris Fox

Artist Statement for Quarental, 2018: A sad elegy to the end of “nature”, the work is a mourning ritual, yet also stands outside the conventions of grief and memorial to look back at the legacy of crying rites, the ones that are social constructs, the expected manners around dying and the dirges of contemporary death. Sadness, the depression left after departure, what of it? How to xpress it within and in contrast to “nature”? Playing the moth, the one attracted to and destroyed by fire, alighting on industrial equipment, wings swept towards an unstable horizon and vanishing, this costumed performance, and it’s forty lines of poetry are simultaneously self-fashioning, poetry video, requiem, and a manoeuvre of black velvet. The costume is devoré (meaning to devour), fibre-etched through a chemical process that “eats” at the rayon fibers making up its velvet pile, leaving only the silk weave, creating transparent gaps. Velvet is a constellation of techniques, origins, methods and histories. Using a textile with this palimpsest of material history chews on ruin and eco-sexual gothicisms. The patterns I devoré were inspired by childhood book illustrations, floral motifs, migrations of textile designs across time and place, the bear paw, queer desire, and the hangover left after the end of the millennium—gothic melancholy. The cloth’s performativity is an anachronicity, soft blasphemy, dancing with occult matters pressed into the folds of black velvet. I consider my own loser necromancies, strange and anonymous encounters, twilight zones, my body, the beach and wind, the velvet commingled and co-contaminated; lurkswoopswoons within Joyelle McSweeney’s Necropastoral. This form of elegiac poetics—imagined funerals, dirge-core, flag dances, poor revenants—the title of my work Quarental 2018, is taken from an obscured tradition of performing a set of forty requiem masses, one finds quarantine in the same neighborhood of the OED. I think of the work as commemorative matter—a necroarchive.

– Morris Fox (he/they), PhD Student, MFA, BFA Artist Practitioner & Writer