Strout
Liquid Text
Liquid Text is a video installation that addresses the limitations of language, subjectivity, and perception. A series of autobiographical poems are written onto a mirror and manipulated with a variety of liquid chemicals. The resulting disintegration / destruction of the text is a metaphor for the unstable nature of language. The formal use of the mirror is a metaphor for self-reflection and the subjective nature of language.
Body Map addresses two topics that often inform the conceits of my work; the subjugating effects of location technology, and the demonization of desire in academic literature. Mirroring the conservative and repressive nature of religious codes of conduct, certain academic literature cynically posits desire as a narcissistic reaction to the oppression produced by established social scripts
carried out, in part, by location technology being involuntarily projected onto the body.
Body Map
60TH1K is a mixed media work that makes use of video installed onto a media cabinet that resembles a confession booth. The work features sexually charged imagery, profaned religious iconography, and my own queer and masculine presenting body. Embedded within the piece is a tension between my participation in the Gothic subculture as an act of resistance to the religious supposition that queerness is immoral, and my critical approach to the subculture’s contradictory conceit that androgyny is a largely male-oriented practice. 60TH1K is both a celebration of the Goth subculture as a site of social resistance, and an attempt to advance and facilitate further progress in social defiance within it through imagery that honors a gender fucking, queerness, and complex appearance of a transgender identity that is often missing from representations of Gothic-identified individuals in media.