An Invitation to Grieve

Dexter Rosengrave

Gallery 4
Opening 08.01.20 6-8pm
Artist Talks 30.01.20 6-7pm

How do people who experience disembodiment manage grief when the body is the primary medium for emotional processing? How do queer understandings of loss disrupt the dominant idea that grief can transform, or that we can return to our pre-loss selves once we’ve ‘processed’?

My mother has recently disowned me because of my transmasculine identity. An Invitation to Grieve explores this estrangement and what constitutes loss and grief in a relationship’s end. Through the platforms of live endurance performance, domestic and personal objects, photography and sound, I disrupt the linearity of grief and the finality of ‘transformation’. Instead, An Invitation to Grieve plays with the boundaries of what familial loss is: do we grieve what was never there?

On the opening night I will engage in an endurance performance where I’ll handle four blue, heavy ceramic dinner plates that my mother handed down to me several years ago. The performance will end with me dropping the plates allowing them to smash at my feet.

The weight of the plates has caused them to remain largely unused, stored in the back of my kitchen cupboard for years. This stowing away of the plates is symbolic of my resistance to accept the abandonment by my mother and the loss of my relationship with her. The performance speaks to the reciprocal laboriousness of intergenerational trauma — carrying both my mother’s trauma and my own trauma relating to my mother. I move towards embodiment in a physical but aggressively tender manner, in turn inviting grief to enter my body during the performance. The performance is therefore a way to respond to my grief and a somatisation of it through the medium of my body. Unlike my previous performances, this work induces emotions rather than attempting to resolve them, through what are typically understood to be ‘productive’ actions; my trans self a site of contrary embodiment.

Also included in the exhibition is a recently gold-dipped shoe that I wore as an infant, and a sound piece on vinyl made from fragments of one of the last conversations I had with my mother.

Images

Dexter Rosengrave, An Invitation to Grieve, 2019, performance, dimensions variable

Dexter Rosengrave, Static Square, 2019, photographic print, 31.43 x 31.43

Dexter Rosengrave, An Invitation to Grieve, 2019, performance, dimensions variable,

Dexter Rosengrave, An Invitation to Grieve, 2019, performance, dimensions variable