Coming Soon: Afterlife was a project that compressed pre-post-and-production into a simultaneous moment, and explored the aesthetics of TV, film, theater, and fashion, and how these mediations have effected our (myself and my colaborators) ability to articulate and invent ourselves as queer people.
The main event was a trailer and blu-ray special features of itself.
It was a portal to an afterlife, not after death, but the space after a transformative release. On Easter Sunday, in the abandoned shell of a hair salon, we talked about many interpretations of what an afterlife can be, in this space dedicated to rituals of transformation and aspiration. We created a set; an environment as a hyper-sculpture to serve as springboard for a collaborative movie. We made the waiting room of the salon into the stage, and put the dressing room on the other side of the curtain as a way of refering to and confusing the structure of a theater. We worked to create and undermine the illusion at every step. The camera operator was almost always in frame. Truth and artifice play together, and in order to create the future, we must first create ourselves.
The colors are not the nuanced and idiosyncratic colors of life, but color products: red of an operatic curtain, green-screen green, and blue from an eternal spring...Behr’s Artesian Water.
We worked together and touched everything. We quoted from the documentary style of RuPaul’s Drag Race and Paris is Burning, looking at the ways dominant queer culture entertains us and teaches us to style ourselves. We were anxious. We leaned in to tropes related to queer representation, and into ways memetic repetition is used by queer folks to create community and some sort of collective identity.
We looked for parallels between the ways contemporary dis-and-re-assemblies of time and bodies have changed perceptions of history and the present, and ways that queerness builds off of and undermines narratives of progress and the future.
We preened, we looked at ourselves in the mirror, we looked at ourselves in the mirror forever. We prioritized the intertext, the space between anything that could be read as the content. We pre-gamed and went straight to the afterparty, taking off our clothes forever, spinning, loading.
Coming Soon:Afterlife was made in collaboration with Lennie Hsiao, Rollie Fisk, and Erick Guerrios.
The main event was a trailer and blu-ray special features of itself.
It was a portal to an afterlife, not after death, but the space after a transformative release. On Easter Sunday, in the abandoned shell of a hair salon, we talked about many interpretations of what an afterlife can be, in this space dedicated to rituals of transformation and aspiration. We created a set; an environment as a hyper-sculpture to serve as springboard for a collaborative movie. We made the waiting room of the salon into the stage, and put the dressing room on the other side of the curtain as a way of refering to and confusing the structure of a theater. We worked to create and undermine the illusion at every step. The camera operator was almost always in frame. Truth and artifice play together, and in order to create the future, we must first create ourselves.
The colors are not the nuanced and idiosyncratic colors of life, but color products: red of an operatic curtain, green-screen green, and blue from an eternal spring...Behr’s Artesian Water.
We worked together and touched everything. We quoted from the documentary style of RuPaul’s Drag Race and Paris is Burning, looking at the ways dominant queer culture entertains us and teaches us to style ourselves. We were anxious. We leaned in to tropes related to queer representation, and into ways memetic repetition is used by queer folks to create community and some sort of collective identity.
We looked for parallels between the ways contemporary dis-and-re-assemblies of time and bodies have changed perceptions of history and the present, and ways that queerness builds off of and undermines narratives of progress and the future.
We preened, we looked at ourselves in the mirror, we looked at ourselves in the mirror forever. We prioritized the intertext, the space between anything that could be read as the content. We pre-gamed and went straight to the afterparty, taking off our clothes forever, spinning, loading.
Coming Soon:Afterlife was made in collaboration with Lennie Hsiao, Rollie Fisk, and Erick Guerrios.