Umbrella Projects: Fruit Salad
Fruit Salad features a mélange of videos and filmed performances that explore gender performativity and celebrate masquerade, personas, and other fluid forms of identity. The artists included here use queer and feminist theory to critique gender roles and homophobia embedded in Western culture. Their alter egos and performances function as multivocal tools for the expression of identities that question the social constructs and confines of gender. Drag personas, caricatures, eccentric costuming, and anthropomorphism thus serve as methods to critique and deconstruct discriminatory gender essentialism and its ideals.
Fruit Salad—Umbrella Projects’ second video program—was organized in response to the erosion of community spaces for LGBTQ2S+ communities at Mount Allison University and in the town of Sackville, New Brunswick. Our first screening, Sweetest Sympathy, was dedicated to Thunder & Lightning, a beloved local hangout and safe space that was forced to close during the COVID-19 pandemic. Coinciding with Halloween, Fruit Salad thus seeks to hold space for LGBTQ2S+ and gender non-conforming communities online and on-campus through a fun, yet thought-provoking program of campy, gender-critical and queer video art and performances. Simultaneously streamed online and screened in the Owens Art Gallery’s picture window (from dusk to dawn), this program is free to watch for two weeks.
Essay
Fruit Salad is the second video screening organized by Umbrella Projects, a collaboration between the Owens Art Gallery and Struts Gallery. It presents a mélange of videos and filmed performances that explore gender performativity and celebrate masquerade, personas, and other fluid forms of identity. The artists featured—blackpowerbarbie, The Clichettes, Marissa Sean Cruz, Maya Ben David, Séamus Gallagher, Jillian Mayer, Lucas Morneau, Tom Rubnitz, Victoria Sin, Ariel Smith, and Feather Talia—use queer and feminist theory to critique gender roles and homophobia embedded in Western culture. Their alter egos and performances thus function as multivocal tools for the expression of identities that question the social constructs and confines of gender. Drag personas, caricatures, eccentric costuming, and anthropomorphism thus serve as methods to critique and deconstruct discriminatory gender essentialism and its ideals.
A common theme among the works presented in Fruit Salad is domestic space and activities traditionally associated with “women’s work.” For example, Tom Rubnitz and Victoria Sin queer the kitchen in video works that combine camp glitz with homemaker kitsch. In Pickle Surprise (1989), Rubnitz collaborates with drag performers like The Lady Bunny, RuPaul, and Sister Dimension, the latter dressed in a bejewelled pickle costume. In Strawberry Shortcut (1989), Sister Dimension metamorphoses again into a neon-pink-skinned troll in chef’s attire. Both videos demonstrate quick and easy sandwich and dessert recipes for “woman on the go.” In their droll performance Sandwich (2018), Victoria Sin makes “gender the butt of the joke.” Using Wonder Bread, processed cheese, and butter slathered on with a butcher’s cleaver, they demonstrate how to make a sandwich to an audience at drag performer Sasha Velour’s touring show Nightgowns. The kitchen is thus transformed into a nightclub and the dull act of making a cheese sandwich becomes a satirical queer spectacle. Conversely, Ariel Smith’s film, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2008), turns making and consuming a cake into a vengeful, tragic-comic performance of feminine power that ends with the observation, “If you can bake a cake you can build a bomb.”
On the other end of the spectrum, performance collective The Clichettes criticize toxic masculinity and depictions of violence in the media through their video performance Go To Hell (1985), which features members of the collective performing as drag kings in nude illusions to Mötorhead’s song Go To Hell (1982). Quick flashes of found footage litter the video, including stealth bombers dropping missiles, Godzilla attacking a helicopter, nuclear explosions, and women screaming in horror. The violence of the found footage is paired with images of the trio thrashing on stage with fake electric guitars and parodying the masochistic poses and performance style of head-bangers and metal bands from the ’80s. In a similar vein, queer interdisciplinary artist Lucas Morneau also uses lip-sync performance to deconstruct toxic gender ideals. In Meet Ze Mummer (2020), Morneau appears as his alter ego, The Queer Mummer, a crochet-loving drag performer whose striptease lip-synch to PJ Harvey’s Meet Ze Monsta (1995) subverts gender expectations and reclaims mummering, a traditional practice common to Newfoundland.
Several of the artists in Fruit Salad explore the intersection between desire, digital technology, and the commodity form. Maya Ben David (MBD), for example, uses anthropomorphism and cosplay in their video Air Canada Gal (2015), which features the artist performing as a fictional airplane mascot for the Canadian airline. Modelling in pin-up poses to a slowed-down version of the SellOffVacations.com jingle, Air Canada Gal uses Western advertising techniques to parody what Walter Benjamin once called “the sex appeal of the inorganic.” Séamus Gallagher’s video Thinking of You, Thinking of Me, on the other hand, delves into the imperfect mimicry of replicas and links the creative practices of non-human animals with drag artistry to explore concepts of imitation, embodiment, and desire. Gallagher’s persona, Sara Tonin, appears in this work as a collection of 3D face scans and photoshopped makeup printed onto a folded paper mask. Sara Tonin imitates the beauty queens one expects to see on a velvet-lined stage, like the one Gallagher’s character inhabits. In reality, this stage is also a mimic constructed of printed paper.
Miami-based Jillian Mayer also explores how technology shapes our identities through works like I Am Your Grandma (2011), a video diary for her unborn future grandchild. Through vocal distortion and a number of fully masked costumes, Mayer questions the traditional roles of maternal figures and how they are expected to act and perform in technocratic settler societies. Similarly, Marissa Sean Cruz presents a pastiche of the iconic British spy, James Bond 007, in a “queer, racialized cyberfuture.” As the artist explains, the Bond franchise has specifically left a stain on her identity: she was named after Sean Connery by her Filipino-American grandfather, inspired by his love for the Scottish actor’s portrayal of James Bond.
How one performs the self in public is also a key concern of drag performance as a mode of identity expression and a radical liberation from gender binaries. For Feather Talia, a two-spirit drag performer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, drag is a means of exploring and learning about the Indigenous culture they lost growing up in the Canadian foster care system. Their video Want To (2020) is thus both an exploration of gender fluidity and a celebration of cultural identity. Similarly, alter-egos can also empower oppressed communities. blackpowerbarbie, Amika Cooper’s alter-ego, utilizes animated video in Edges to call for radical self-love through slicking down one’s baby hairs in intricate designs, known colloquially as “edges.” Racialized queer bodies, often subjected to white heteronormative violence, are front and centre, reclaiming space and identity through acts of resistance, especially as Western society continues to label black hairstyles unprofessional and dirty.
Through these alter-egos, personas, and costumes, white supremacy and its heteronormative and violent ideology are deconstructed. By reclaiming space and critiquing the gender binary and its sexist essentialist ideals, the artists in Fruit Salad offer alternatives. These performative masquerades point out the flaws in Eurocentric thinking and suggest a more empowering and equalizing perspective on the world.
— Hannah Bridger, Emily Falvey, Lucas Morneau, Curators
