Artist-Led Tour of Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle

Artist-Led Tour of Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle

Photos courtesy of Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle

The artist himself Machine Dazzle will lead a tour through his first solo exhibition.

The exhibition:

  • Brings together nearly 100 of the artist’s creations for stage, spectacles, and street theater
  • Chronicles the metamorphosis of Flower, a closeted suburban kid from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, into “Machine Dazzle,” the queer experimental theater genius.
  • Includes the first public installation of more than two dozen tour-de-force costumes created by the artist for himself and his long-time collaborator, Taylor Mac

About the event:

Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle is the first solo exhibition dedicated to the genre-defying artist Matthew Flower (US, b. 1972), better known as Machine Dazzle. A provocateur commanding an expanding repertoire of stagecraft, design, performance, and music, Machine Dazzle is a virtuoso practitioner of queer maximalism’s aesthetic language of liberation.

Excessive in scale, color, surface, texture, and movement, Machine Dazzle’s living sculptures constantly transform as the designer combines the familiar embellishments of drag and burlesque, such as sequins, glitter, and feathers, beads, with found fantastical and found objects, such as ping pong balls, hoop skirts, slinkies, soup cans, and more, to build and deepen the work’s narrative intent. The result is an explosive “queer maximalism” aesthetic that joyfully counters the prejudices of high culture regarding extravagance and the overly decorated and embraces these associations as queer for affirming hybridity over purity, rejecting cultural hierarchies, and valuing different kinds of bodies.

Please be aware that some of the works on view contain adult sexual content.  

 

Ready to join this event?
Ready to join this event?
Ready to join this event?
Comments are closed.