emerging practices

It’s been a pleasure to occasionally write here, and I’m currently handing the reins off to Cayden, who’ll certainly write more. But before I go, let me talk a little bit about the installation I just had as part of the &Now Festival.

Meat Out of the Eater was a sort of multimedia sculpture/installation, done in collaboration with a poet and a media artist who previously lived in Athens, GA with me. Lara Glenum is an excellent poet whose work centers around the grotesque as a tool for exploring gender and sexuality (and who provided the text for the work), and Josef Horáček is an artist and translator who took the words and made animation and sound. I, with a great deal of help from my partner Katy, built the sculpture that became the physical (and conceptual) frame for the work. The title (and text) of the piece comes from the second half of Lara’s most recent book, Maximum Gaga. It’s a sort of hybrid poem-play, retelling the story of the conception and birth of the Minotaur.

This work represents, in a way, a conceptual changing-of-the-guards in my personal practice — the end of a language-centric framework and movement towards a more socially and environmentally engaged way of thinking. Which is not to say that I wouldn’t love to see this work travel around and have a life of its own — that would be ideal. In fact, the work was installed last week as part of the Media Study Graduate Open Studio Opening, and thus placed in a completely different context. If you’re interested in this sort of work (or in my work in general), feel free to comment here or shoot me an e-mail at jordanda[at]buffalo.edu

The above photos were taken by the author and editor John Dermot Woods. More are available here. Below is the video/sound stream from the installation.

Meat Out of the Eater from Josef Horáček on Vimeo.