Phoenix Adler
Statement
“Fluid connections, the celebration of ambiguity and a sense of ritual in chaos…the re-emergence of a Gothic psyche. Deeply invested in the notion of complexity, this work explores the arena of the monstrous as an entrée to rapture. Artists working in this mode push the deconstruction and dissolution of centre, definitions and boundaries to reach sublime terror of placelessness. This impulse coexists with a desire for physicality and sensuality, however dark.”
~ Shamin M. Momin
The draw towards the uncanny, the grotesque, abject, sharp, cold, fragmented, shadows, haunted, pulls from a need to articulate a felt sense outside of the known and transverse into unknown territory of the raw fleshy core of embodied traumas that hold the future, the past, and the present. An act of exorcising the haunted/ing: navigating the complexity embodied trauma connected to the wider mechanism of longevity, resilience, and overall the messiness, stickiness of being in a body. The haunted/ing creates a threshold for world building: a reimagining through embodied trauma///////Play: definitions including to perform, to entertain, and/or an activity///////Process rather than the final ‘product’. In my opinion and from my research, a haunting has no beginning or ending, but is ever present whether conscious or not. This practice of process rather than focusing on the final product is to emphasize and push back on fixed endings, fixed linearity, an embodiment of trauma to be fixed.
“The body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored by countless other bodies…The body as home, but only if it is understood that the stolen body can be reclaimed. The bodies irrevocably taken from us… entering our bodies as liberation, joy, fury, hope, a will to refigure the world.”
~ Eli Clare
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