White Queen Canvas

White Queen Canvas

White Queen is a paintable dress, cape, bag, and shoes I created as part of White Room in creative collaboration with Anita Durst, and performance by Anita Durst, Creative Director and Founder of Chashama.

The White Queen wearable is a 3d paintable white sculpture that gets covered with graffiti over the course of the performance. The bag contained brushes, paints, markers and paper flowers.

White

White is a reckless painter identity and wearable for which I developed a branded coverall, a variation on my Ingredients of a Subway Car identity.

White performance included inviting people to paint and developing rituals around participants “entering” the White Room, helping participants put on shoe covers, clothes protection, and gloves, handing them brushes and paint, helping participants “exiting” the room, taking off shoe covers,  clothes covers and gloves. In addition, White had duties like cleaning brushes, replenishing paint, and maintaining the White Room functionality, as well as photography and videography.

It all goes back to the rituals of clean rooms I have seen in media and movies, but also keeping the installation contained so as not to create thousands of dollars worth of post-operation cleanup. White also wore special painting extensions, with brushes attached to hair braids which some people painted with.

This performance is about my frustrations with procrastination and not actually painting. It is also about dealing with being invisible to the art world and participating in society with my high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome. It is my rebellion against the corporate state art world where all art is produced, handled, and written like a corporate press release from an apocalyptic, Brazil-movie-like world. In this corporate state art world everyone produces institution-sanctioned art conformed to the established narrative. As if someone somewhere turns a knob in the cloud and the entire art world produces the same art.

White Room Clothes Covers

I created several elements within the same universe as the coverall: clothes cover ponchos, shoe covers box, gloves box. I branded and stamped the elements with the “White Room Paint Anything” phrase.