“MOOOOOOB!” – created 2009, installed 2012, 2013

Here are some samples (contains nudity): https://vimeo.com/122145255 clip length: 2 min 54 sec

MOOOOOOB! Or Mamorial Offering, is a series of performances for video. There is 45 minutes of edited footage in six sequences. They are meant to take form as installations.

In MOOOOOOB! I decontextualized and re-contextualize my “boobs”, exploring what boobs are, what boobs do, what boobs are for, who boobs are for…

For myself and others who might relate, I try to communicate my embodiment as a person with breasts though playful, surreal images about objectification / my reflection of objectification. In the performances, I remember, even while still hoisting and holstering, my two, too-large-to-live-with breasts, and claim my relationship to them before their unalterable reduction.

Through creative, emotional re-imagining, I was seeking tranquility: grief.  I wanted to feel the whole weight of the 660 grams that would be removed (lost?). The exploration was counter the narrations of chest reconstructions as ever a simple extraction of the extraneous, even as they exhibit the onerous and oneiric.

The method of materiality and abstraction remains, with my living breasts as the starting “object”.  I was careful to use only one camera person, as the classical objectifying gaze. Many people assisted me / witnessed live the performances. Four people were asked to appear with me. Two pulled out and could not due to intense reactions approaching the shoot (flashbacks). The two who do appear create a duo performance with me of their own relationship to breasts through surreal image.

They were installed as a work in progress in 2012 at a small student gallery as part of a show called “Forrest Bodies,” which looked at the monstrousness of embodiment (EEL gallery belonging to the Visual Studies Program).

In 2013, they were installed as a site-specific installation at Oasis Aqualounge, commissioned as part of a Toronto PRIDE event celebrating trans* people. Oasis Aqualounge is a sex club focused on women located in a historic Victorian manor. The manor has a history as a gay men’s bathhouse, Club Toronto. It was open for the event as a sex club and party space. The footage was on a television monitor in the retro room, and the space was in full use while the footage was played. This resituated the footage in a place where “pornography” would usually be, a respectful gesture expressing my confusion regarding exclusion and inclusion of persons/bodies like mine in sex-cultures.