Perpetual Horror
Kerith Manderson-Galvin
11 – 13 July 2024, IN | ARI
“The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I.”
(Kristeva 1982)
Kerith Manderson-Galvin describes their relationship to horror as wanting to elicit in the viewer, the explicit experience of emotions such as fear and disgust, of being ‘touched inside’, made aware of your own body’s limits, mortality, and leakiness. They are drawn to the kind of horror-full beauty that makes you weepy, and things leaky.
Kathy Acker style literary cut-ups influence their shape-shifting performance and unique version of explicit body (Schneider 1997). The time-travelling text blurs in the mouth between moments of history, their life as it was, myth, their life now, this moment together in the room, movies, a lyric. It spills into instructional black outs permitting you to ‘do what you want with your body’.
But the room is wrong, unstable, and it’s unclear if the instruction is too. The rules of the space are failing. Rock turns cliff, fleshy and bejeweled. Skin peels from the walls.
After crossing the viewer divide with their instructional and gestural invitations, Manderson-Galvin moves closer, as the tactile proximity of the site allows, by gently filling the nose, mouth, heads of the audience with the fluff of Hello Kitty perfume, a burst of Hubba Bubba bubblegum and its quick fade as things get chewy.
The artist becomes more than one body, giving and receiving messy kinds of touch in moments of monstrous tenderness after Patricia Piccinini. The surreal domesticity softness of Pina Bausch slides into VNS Matrix G-Slime and forms a rockpool of anatomical mythologies not unlike Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle. The walls drip into oceanic substrates of sound. An indescribable changeling squirms its way through an undulating ritual and Manderson-Galvin pulls us into a liquid space, leaving language behind to build another world somewhere between sublimation and the sublime.
These slippy realities are augmented by automated familiars that scuttle through this uncanny valley. Their pop culture aesthetics and diminutive choreography is in humorous contrast with the symbolic forces of Jurassic deep time, cockroach infested immortality, and perpetual motion that they represent.
This is a frilly, strange and visceral experience of the queer feminine, the body as a relational site, of transgression and perpetual transformation. Kerith Manderson-Galvin deliberately rides us through this faraway land into the distance “toward the place_where meaning collapses” (Kristeva). If only this ride were endless.
Cat Jones
Cat Jones is an award winning artist, writer, researcher, and all round creatrix with over 30 years experience. Her investigations centre on subjugated knowledge with experiments in revelation and transformation through the subversion of social constructs, history, science, language and the senses.