Hot dog, 2008-2011
Hot dogs, mason jars, lace, pearls.
I like sausages.
My favorite butcher shop employs young men, eager faces bristled faces white aprons. Rows of flesh shiny and partitioned, sold by the pound with printed stickers. Everything is bright.
Part of the art is the trip to the shop.
I bring back white bundles of sausage casings, hotdogs, chicken skin. Labeled. They sit in the fridge, they are opened, crinkly. The hotdogs are sewn with lace, canned, filmed. I stuff the casings with lace and pearls and dry them as a link, hung high like flower garlands. The chicken skin, well, that is still in process.
It wasn’t always about meat. I have made translucent flax paper that looks like skin, or thick sheets of handmade paper that looks like leather. But it has always been about bodies: my body, queer bodies. The way bodies are lovely and repulsive. How bodies change through time or defy classification.
Then there is reading. Queer theory, feminist theory, science theory. The dirty bodies of Jean Genet. The brevity of Eileen Myles. These things feed back into a process.
Monochrome is pleasing, as are dangling threads.
My favorite butcher shop employs young men, eager faces bristled faces white aprons. Rows of flesh shiny and partitioned, sold by the pound with printed stickers. Everything is bright.
Part of the art is the trip to the shop.
I bring back white bundles of sausage casings, hotdogs, chicken skin. Labeled. They sit in the fridge, they are opened, crinkly. The hotdogs are sewn with lace, canned, filmed. I stuff the casings with lace and pearls and dry them as a link, hung high like flower garlands. The chicken skin, well, that is still in process.
It wasn’t always about meat. I have made translucent flax paper that looks like skin, or thick sheets of handmade paper that looks like leather. But it has always been about bodies: my body, queer bodies. The way bodies are lovely and repulsive. How bodies change through time or defy classification.
Then there is reading. Queer theory, feminist theory, science theory. The dirty bodies of Jean Genet. The brevity of Eileen Myles. These things feed back into a process.
Monochrome is pleasing, as are dangling threads.
hotdog from emmett sunday on Vimeo.