MEETING [THE] TEXT HALFWAY

EXEG[TH]ESIS DOCUMENTATION
SHOW: All PAST TEXT OBJECT TONGUES TOWERS SWEAT RETRIBUTION QUEER NEXT
THE WORD BECOMES FLESH
NORTHERN CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART//2019

 The Word Becomes Flesh (2018) extends my ongoing exploration of what I term text/flesh entanglements. Through projection, wax, audio, and surface, text and body are staged as mutually constitutive—each formed through the other in the act of encounter.

The work draws on the theological formulation of the word becoming flesh, but reconfigures it as a cyclical process. This is performed through a series of projected, multiplied figures whose movements take on a liturgical and mythic quality, as though the viewer has entered a speculative space of ritual or worship.

Here, inscription does not precede the body, nor follow it, but emerges through movement, surface, and repetition. My practice prays as text becomes flesh and flesh becomes text.

APOCRYPHILIA
NORTHERN CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART//2019 “Have they in fact led to thinking in another way… Maybe at best they have allowed one to think in another way what one already thought, and to see what one has done from a different vantage point and in a different light…” (Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, 1990, p. 11) 

Apocryphilia speaks of an orientation, a desire towards text, specifically apocryphal text. But how? What are the qualities of apocryphal texts to elicit, contingent on those properties, a sense of attraction, orientation and desire? After all, a text can become apocryphal which at one point was not. In any case, there can be any number of differing ideas, frameworks and belief systems from which certain texts, claiming to be written within and about such traditions, are precluded as apocryphal. So, what could apocryphilia be, given the stark, disciplinary and ideological differences between the various and multiple cannons that what ends up as the apocryphal is ‘othered’ by? 

Perhaps it is the process by which the apocryphal appears as such? The process and following fact of exclusion? A fondness for exclusion or the excluded? Perhaps its status as other, as discarded? A fondness toward that which is otherwise? But why specifically text? What is even meant by text? 

Denoting the apocryphal is in some way a process of categorisation, prefaced by notions of legitimacy and illegitimacy. The apocryphal is then, also, a spatial concept; a location, arena or place where spurious, illegitimate, dubious and dangerous texts are discarded and dumped, or simply re-homed within a lesser body. Hidden in plain sight. Labelled ‘other’, these texts provide insight, context, perhaps even edification, however, never truth. A fondness, then, for falsity?  

Is it even correct to assess the apocryphal within the binary of legitimacy and illegitimacy? There are canonical texts and non-canonical texts, but not all of the later are apocryphal. That which denotes the apocryphal, therefore, finds itself somewhere in-between; their relation is not necessarily that of a negation, rather, a displacement. The space of the in-between is the terrain of the queer; a place for the strange, the curious, the ‘that doesn’t seem quite right’. Canon-space is the location of the standard; apocryphal space is queer-space. 

I AM A TEXT
NAN GIESIE GALLERY//CDU//17.11.17

A small body of work exploring religious tropes and transgressive gestures through a defiant, queer, aesthetic envisioning of flesh/text entanglements. The exhibition contained material and digital artefacts, installed as an immersive cacophony, a profane temple with an altar upon which lay a Bible with pages torn out from the second page of the Book of Genesis to the last page of the Book of Revelation. A flamboyant figure delivering a glittering prophecy, their spectral head floating recursively across the screen overlaid with the missing Bible pages repeats, “I am a text. I am a text.” 

“Where is the line where the body ends and the text begins?
Where is the axis where the paper shuts and the text pops in?
Who set this arbitrary demarcation of my skin?
I'm a text, baby, a text kind of flesh!”

I AM A TEXT
MARKET MARKET//DARWIN FESTIVAL//26.08.2023 I AM A TEXT was one of a suite of short motion graphics and animations accompanied by sound recordings of Darwin’s Rapid Creek Markets by Carlo Ansaldo were distributed through the markets and market-based events as QR codes printed onto brown paper take away bags. Part of Market Market, an experimental artslab and site–specific exploration and celebration of the local communities that the Rapid Creek Market supports.


The transcript from the 2017 video work was worked up into a multipanel, wax covered Risographic print (see below). Individual panels were scanned and animated to be distributed and dispersed within the quotidian flows of market life.




I  AM A TEXT
STUDIO EXPLORATION//2024The transcript from the I AM A TEXT video work was worked up into a multipanel, wax covered Risographic print. This process moved through a series of digital and analogue process, mirroring the hybrid nature Of Risography. The text was redesigned  in Illustrator and InDesign and manipulated in Photoshop to compose a 40 pannel, three-colour Riso-print. Once printed, the pannels were scanned and installed virtually into a C4D motion graphic. The physical panels were each hand painted with an encaustic (wax) medium, so that when polished, the letters would buff up to a leathery sheen. Care was taken to apply wax only into the lettering, requiring a complex procedure of specific temperatures, layering and pace. The infinite reorderings of the panels re-transcribe the text into new meanings of variable legibility.


AB/OB/JECTIONS
NAN GIESE GALLERY//19.02.2021
Injected, ejected, rejected, subjected, objected, adjected, interjected, abjected, projected; queer artist Matthew van Roden takes their hand to casting in all its forms. Casting of characters, casting digits and casting words into the air, Ab/ob/jections continues van Roden’s longstanding meditation on bodies and texts. Wax, text and flesh are cycled and recycled, turning and returning in a land where the devil makes work for idle hands.

AB/OB/JECTIONS is a semantic interrogation of ways of being. Consider the terms ‘subject’, ‘object’ and ‘abject’. A mere prefix fixes what is in and what is out of being and time. 

Often, queer bodies hold memories and knowledge of shifting between subject, object and abject positions. As designations, these positions can be both liberatory and brutal. 

Whilst the prefixes ‘sub’, ‘ob’ and ‘ab’ articulate states of being, The ‘ject’ of subject, object and abject (as well as eject, reject, inject etc.) introduces dynamic movement into the question of being.

‘Ject’ speaks to throwing, jettisoning and casting.

AB/OB/JECTIONS explores aspects of being that are thrown or cast through the fluid materialities of wax, text and flesh.


AB/OB/JECTIONS
WATCH THIS SPACE//12.08.2022AB/OB/JECTIONS travelled to Watch This Space (Mparntwe, Alice Springs). The works were reconfigured according to equipment availability and the wax fingers were installed without the video (preferable I think) and arranged on shelves in a grid. Since the first showing of the work, one of the fingers was used in a lost-wax process to create a new digit from reclaimed aluminium.


WE CAN ALL SPEAK IN TONGUES
POLITIKANT//DARWIN VISUAL ARTS//26.06.2020For the Pentecostal, speaking in tongues is a sign of the infilling of the Holy Spirit, evidence of one’s full immersion into the spiritual and supernatural dimensions of Christian life. As a practice it represents a boundary that articulates an inside and therefore an outside of the faith community. This boundary encompasses and excludes based on many varied practices, informed by particular interpretations of scripture. 

Current national discourse around redefining the boundaries of religious freedom vis-a-vis anti-discrimination within Australian law has been driven largely by a Pentecostal world view. Political leadership has determined the importance of these discussions as paramount. This work seeks to contribute to the discussion through an interrogation of the porousness of the boundaries against which discrimination seeks its justification. 

I was ‘filled with the Holy Spirit’ at the age of 11 and subsequently can speak in tongues. Although I left the church at 22, I have managed to retain the 'gift' of speaking in tongues. Perhaps it was for this very moment in our national history when our political leaders need us to speak in a mode they can relate to and in a language they can understand.


WE CAN ALL SPEAK IN TONGUES
BRAVING TIME//QUEER CONTEMPORARY//NATIONAL ART SCHOOL//03.02.2023We can all speak in tongues was reconfigured and exhibited in Braving Time: Contemporary art in Queer Australia at Sydney’s National Art School (NAS). Curated By Richard Perram OAM for NAS’ Queer Contemporary programing, the exhibition was part of the arts offering for Sydney World Pride 2023.

Braving time is a queer exhibition that celebrates the work of artists who identify as part of the Australian LGBTIQA+ community. This significant exhibition has been curated by Richard Perram OAM for the National Art School in celebration of Sydney WorldPride in 2023. The artists represented in the exhibition celebrate the diverse voices of LGBTIQA+ people in contemporary Australia society, reflecting the breath of genders and sexualities within the community, including artists who identify as lesbian, gay, transgender, inter-sex, asexual and non-binary.

The artists present artworks that explore queerness in ways that are direct and indirect through historical and contemporary artworks that are critical, experimental and political, connecting to our contemporary culture. Together these works instigate conversations about queer experience; what it is and what it means to be queer in Australia today.

Artists
Tony Albert,  Brook Andrew, Liam Benson, Vivienne Binns, Leigh Bowery, Gary Carsley, Michelle Collocott, Peter Cooley, Christine Dean, Karla Dickens, Todd Fuller, Amos Gebhardt, Tina Havelock Stevens, Brenton Heath-Kerr, Kate Just, Deborah Kelly, MO’JU, Clinton Naina, Nell, Claudia Nicholson, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Emily Parsons-Lord, Troye Sivan, Ali Tahayori, Salote Tawale, Renjie Teoh, Athena Thebus, Dr Christian Thompson AO, Tim Silver, Matthew van Roden, and William Yang.


BOTANICALS
DARWIN FESTIVAL//2020Carefully choreographed movements map out the porous embodiments of human and more-than-human kind. Head, shoulders, knees, toes, petal, sepal, receptacle, stamen – bodily boundaries, skins and textures are traded, shaped and switched in a curious dance of multi-species exchange from trans-disciplinary artist Matthew van Roden. Curator Britt Guy takes this skin-dance to everyday sites across Darwin in a series of surprising projections where surface, skin, boundary and texture become sites for re-entanglement between the urban and natural world.

©2025I acknowledge The Larrakia People who are the First Peoples and Traditional Custodians of this land and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging. Sovereignty of Country was never ceded.