He Tells Us That His Heart Is Drowning, Super 8mm Installation, Butchers Hook, 2023

A loop of Super 8mm film runs, suspended by a butchers hook, through a projector. The loop is an excerpt from Crazy Wrestling, a 1970 film which presents various theatrical interpretations of wrestling matches, including a bout staged underwater.

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The work presents the actions of the men in the film as gestural, performative and theatrical. As they loop and repeat we consider the gendered nature of their movements. The film itself, levitating as it moves between the butchers hook and the projector, is revealed to be light, thin, material and manipulated. The wall on to which the image is projected is, by contrast, heavy, rooted and solid. The image sits between, neither of those things yet perhaps both of them . The imagery is both document and fantasy, the gestures genuine and performative. Masculine identities being confirmed and reconfirmed, true and false. The spectacle plays out; nostalgia, gender, performance, gesture. 

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