Disgust How You See Yourself Sinking About

Reading School of Art, Degree Show 2024

What is excessive? Taking waste and the erotic, defined by the pleasure of excess, as a starting points, this collaborative work questions how to make spaces (like the wall of a art institution in this case) excessive, wasteful and unassimilable or abject, through the use of sculptures, performance and costume, presented as ornament and pearls (excrement of the mollusc). The excessive makes way for neurodiverse brains which often rely on excess time or movement (stimming) in order to continue continue continue. Brains which can be considered unassimilable/adjected from mainstream ways of interacting in the world, on the edge.

Deposits of rags and trapped breath are layered and soaked and layered again to form fabricated ornamental structures, like that of the pearl. Layering is mimicked as a single spoken phrase is repeated live and digitally. Pre-recorded and past performance sounds fall in and out of sync with the mouth. Voice/words resuscitated like the latex gloves abjected from their temporal and logical centre and back again. The sonic sedimentation disrupts the horizontality of live linear time through the vertical temporality of the virtual (recorded sound).

Architecturally, positioned across two exhibition spaces (a dead end and expansive room), the installation enables an extension of the vertical (dividing) wall into the horizontal plane (through movement and protruding elongated gloves) to be met with contraction (through the concave-space and deflation of upright forms). Caught between multiple axes, the bodies (of performers and sculptures) consider neurodiverse brains in a tension between real and ideal and not fully assimilable into current dominant structures. Intense oscillation between liveness and death/waste of materials and time frames, queers how neurological differences are pushed to the peripheries/norms, and celebrates the potentiality of living on the edges; unconfined and dynamic in arhythmic motions.

Performers: Luca Dayanc, Katrina Dayanc

Concept: Luca Dayanc, Katrina Dayanc

Materials: found metal, suits, felt, latex gloves, dividing wall, vinegar, water. Dimensions: 2mx3.5m installation space.

Sculpture names: Bulb 1, Pearl, Elongated Gloves, A-Board, Foot, Mouth

’Bulb 1’ (in ‘Disgust How You See Yourself Sinking About’, May 2024) close-up installation view.

‘Mouth’ (in ‘Disgust How You See Yourself Sinking About’, May 2024) close-up installation view.

Elongated Erotic Gloves, (in ‘Disgust How You See Yourself Sinking About’, May 2024) close-up installation views.