Efflorescence

Major project designed for university art theory course DART3320 - Art, Gender & Sexuality. Through exploring post-pornographic bodies using anti-spectacular visual strategies such as surrealism and abstraction, the artwork illuminates the ambivalent fluidity / elasticity of queer desires and sexualities. ‘Efflorescence’ draws upon diverse queer ecology and botany, with floral imagery being historically used to signify queer-coded existences (e.g. green carnations, sapphic violets, lavenders, and pansies). This vibrant kaleidoscope of floral symbology is fused with vaguely humanoid (yet alien) bodies and silhouettes, interwoven with fragile sexual organs – an evolving flux of the corporeal and disembodied. Queer sexual desires have become transcendental through this hybridity – orgasmic bodies melting, dancing, convulsing, rippling, distorting, writhing in chaotic emancipation.