The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) will current Queer Maximalism x Device Dazzle, the very first solo exhibition dedicated to the style-defying artist Matthew Flower (US, b. 1972), superior recognized as Device Dazzle. A provocateur commanding an increasing repertoire of stagecraft, design and style, effectiveness, and tunes, Machine Dazzle is a virtuoso practitioner of queer maximalism’s aesthetic language of gay liberation.
On see from September 10, 2022 via February 19, 2023, the exhibition delivers collectively extra than 80 of the artist’s creations for phase, spectacles, and road theater, together with a variety of environments, ephemera, material samples, pictures, and online video. Jointly, they chronicle the metamorphosis of Flower, a closeted suburban kid from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, into “Machine Dazzle,” the queer experimental theater genius.
On watch are both Device Dazzle’s well-known collaborations with drag and overall performance luminaries this kind of as the Dazzle Dancers and Mx Justin Vivian Bond, among the many others, as perfectly as the artist’s latest emergence from at the rear of the scenes to centre stage of his individual creative daily life. Mounted on two flooring of the Museum, the multimedia exhibition culminates with the initially general public set up of the far more than two dozen tour-de-drive costumes developed by the artist for himself and his prolonged-time collaborator Taylor Mac to use in the queer functionality artwork concert manufacturing, Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade Historical past of Well known New music (2016), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
“Since its founding, the Museum of Arts and Style and design has been a residence for artists who have reimagined and radically subverted conventional craft tactics in search of more reliable self-expression,” stated exhibition curator Elissa Auther, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator. “In his quest to queer style, Machine Dazzle demonstrates how costumes have globe-generating capability, why unorthodox products have turn into the chosen way for individuals exterior of the vast majority culture to describe on their own, and the approaches in which excess can both of those transform and transfigure the queer overall body.”
A self-taught designer, Equipment Dazzle’s costumes are a mesmerizing show of densely layered, fantastical observed objects and materials that, when draped in excess of the human kind, recommend a wearable Wunderkammer of American kitsch, tradition, and heritage. Abnormal in scale, coloration, surface, texture, and motion, the dwelling sculptures constantly transform, adapt, and improve with the acquainted gildings of drag and burlesque, these types of as sequins, glitter, feathers, beads, rhinestones, and ribbons, blended with ping pong balls, hoop skirts, Slinkys, soup cans, getaway lights, pipe insulation, potato-chip luggage, chess parts, toy troopers, and far more to develop and deepen the work’s narrative intent. The end result is an explosive queer maximalism aesthetic that joyfully counters the prejudices of higher tradition pertaining to extravagance and the extremely adorned and embraces these associations as queer for affirming hybridity over purity, rejecting cultural hierarchies, and valuing different sorts of bodies.
Queer Maximalism x Equipment Dazzle will be accompanied by a 160-webpage catalog posted by Rizzoli. The catalog brings together an expansive selection of essays and reminiscences from fellow performers, historians, and cultural critics that contemplate each individual component of Device Dazzle’s abundant physique of function, alongside with images of his above-the-major phase creations, designed for himself and others, stage environments, ephemera, and additional.
For the duration of the exhibition, MAD will present a collection of movies curated by Device Dazzle. The movies, dating to the late seventies and early eighties, served condition the artist’s aesthetic sensibility as a kid. The series, which will get underway this slide, will involve screenings of the Faye Dunaway classic The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) for Halloween and Xanadu (1980) starring Olivia Newton-John to mark the artist’s birthday. Attendees of the movie screenings can be expecting costume contests, giveaways, image shoots, and a lot more.
CREDITS
Queer Maximalism x Device Dazzle is generously supported by Leslie and Dale Chihuly.
This venture is supported in aspect by the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts. To obtain out much more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants effects folks and communities, stop by www.arts.gov.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Machine Dazzle has been dazzling stages by way of costumes, sets, and functionality since his arrival in New York in 1994. He has collaborated with artists Julie Atlas Muz, Huge Art Group, Justin Vivian Bond, Taylor Mac, Chris Tanner, Soomi Kim, Pig Iron Theater, Bombay Rickey, and has intended jobs for Opera Philadelphia and Spiegleworld. In addition, he has held residencies at Tyler University of Art at Temple College, Moody Center for the Arts at University of Houston, Wesleyan College, Harvard University’s Theater, Dance & Media Section, and Mana Modern in Jersey Metropolis, NJ. Device Dazzle’s do the job has been exhibited at Parsons College of Layout in New York City, and he contributed to unforgettable camp-themed appears to be for Diane von Furstenberg and Cara Delevingne at the 2019 Satisfied Gala. His do the job for The Cling has been identified with a 2022 Drama Desk Award nomination for Best Costumes for a Musical. This fall, Equipment Dazzle will release his first report Treasure and will perform music from the document at New York City’s Joe’s Pub. Machine Dazzle is represented by Pomegranate Arts.
ABOUT THE MUSEUM OF ARTS AND Structure
The Museum of Arts and Structure (MAD) champions present-day makers across innovative fields and provides the operate of artists, designers, and artisans who apply the maximum amount of ingenuity and skill. Considering that the Museum’s founding in 1956 by philanthropist and visionary Aileen Osborn Webb, MAD has celebrated all sides of earning and the artistic procedures by which elements are remodeled, from traditional approaches to cutting-edge technologies. These days, the Museum’s curatorial software builds upon a loaded heritage of exhibitions that emphasize a cross-disciplinary method to art and structure, and reveals the workmanship behind the objects and environments that form our each day life. MAD supplies an international platform for practitioners who are influencing the course of cultural creation and driving twenty-very first-century innovation, and fosters a participatory placing for website visitors to have direct encounters with competent generating and persuasive operates of art and layout. For extra information, go to madmuseum.org.
