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Wig Heavier Than A Boot

by David Johnson and Philip Matthews

Dec. 6, 2019 – Jan. 4, 2020
High Low Gallery

Wig Heavier Than a Boot brings together photography and video by David Johnson and poetry by Philip Matthews.

David Johnson, photo by Jess T. Dugan
David Johnson, photo by Jess T. Dugan

Revealing Petal — a drag consciousness as whom Matthews manifests to write, and Johnson photographs — the project crosses art-making rituals with isolated performances within domestic spaces and pastoral landscapes. Taken together, the resulting photographs and poems reveal dynamic relationships between author, character, and observer. By articulating a specific creative process in which one identity becomes two, the project, in turn, opens up a conversation about gender expression through an art-historical lens.

The photographs provide one record of author and character, blurring art-historical masculine and feminine postures. The poems provide another, which elaborate upon the lived experience of being, modeling, and sometimes, obscuring Petal. Subverting the ekphrastic literary tradition, Matthews’ poems do not respond to Johnson’s photographs, nor vice-versa. Both forms are made in the present: as Johnson directs the shoot, Matthews makes performance notes that give way to the poem. In this process, Johnson and Matthews continually break open and leverage their own biases and desires to create an authentic body of work.

Phillip Matthews, photo by Matthew Washausen
Philip Matthews, photo by Matthew Washausen

Petal is alternately present and not, like a nonphysical entity invoked by a medium. The photographs capture the blend or distinction between Philip and Petal, and the poems hybridize their perspectives, enacting a relationship that is surreal, empowering, and unbearable, as the project title suggests. What is constant is a sense of a person wanting to belong to the place that hosts them (i.e. farmland in rural Wisconsin, the coast of North Carolina, an art museum in St. Louis, a small church), even or especially when the social norms of that place are felt to ostracize them. Both photographs and poems balance narrative with fragmentation and invite multiple interpretations.