Photo by Simon Courchel for The Invisible Dog
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED DUE TO THE COVID-19 CRISIS
Odalisque is a performance by Peter Clough in which he reimagines the classical reclining nude as a gender non-conforming queer bondage submissive. Sculpture, projection, text, live performance, and music come together in an immersive environment that complicates power relations between sub and Dom, viewer and performer, subject and object.
Custom bondage furniture restrains Clough’s body in the position of a classical reclining nude. While his physical body is restrained and his mouth gagged, digital projections of his hands and face, actively moving and speaking, reinscribe his subjectivity and his power. Clough’s words, alternately political, poetic, narrative and analytical, blend seamlessly with music and sound scapes by noise artist Peter Kalisch. A figure representing the Dom, played by performance artist Adam Liam Rose, wears a digitally reproduced mask of Clough’s face. Together, this sensuous and haunting work takes on the seeming contradictions within the queer submissive consciousness: experiencing restraint as comforting, experiencing humiliation as affirming, experiencing exposure as a kind of armor, and experiencing bondage as freedom.
More details to come.
Peter Clough's interdisciplinary work uses video, sound, sculpture, and perofrmance to address the queer body as a personal and political site of trauma, stigma, desire and empowerment. Clough was born in Boston in 1984 and received an MFA from NYU Steinhardt in 2009. He has presented work in New York at MoMA PS1, Printed Matter, Fresh Window Gallery, Microscope Gallery, Southfirst Gallery, Wayfarers Gallery, LeRoy Neiman Gallery, SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, the Center for Performance Research, and Dixon Place Theater, in Pittsburg at the Andy Warhol Museum, in L.A. at Human Resources, in Nashville at Open Lot, in Berlin at Peres Projects and Space/Time at FLUTGRABEN e.V., in Seoul at Konkuk University and The House of Collections, in Antwerp at the Monty, in Ghent at Off/off Cinema and in Oslo at Kunstnernes Hus, Fotogalleriet, and SOPPEN Performance Festival at Ekebergparken. Clough’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Frieze, and Time Out magazine. Clough lives and works in New York.
Dates + Times
Thursday, May 21, 8–10pm
Friday, May 22, 8–10pm
Admission
Free
Location
51 Bergen St.