Despite our visceral reactions of disgust, instinctual or instilled, there is a secret slippage between repulsion and an attraction. We repress, reject, and expel much of what we consider abject, yet we are also drawn to it - out of curiosity, out of our dissatisfaction with the imposed order of things, and perhaps out of a longing to live in another reality that embraces chaotic, illegible, dirt.

 

Infesting the gallery space with its perverse domesticity, this installation is a rat’s nest of deviant delights.

 

The work sits in relationship to a sociology thesis titled Queer Disgrace, in which I conducted a visual ethnographic investigation of the Sydney queer punk subcultural scene. In the thesis I demonstrate ways in which the participants I filmed enacted a playful creative strategy of ‘queer disgrace’ through dance, style, and texts to subvert mainstream capitalist ideals.  

 

The exhibition embodies core themes and strategies of ‘queer disgrace’, including inversions that turn our construction of ‘normality’ upside down and inside out, celebrations of the politically disruptive potential of ‘dirt’ and the abject, and rebellious resistance to ‘the rules’. Like the queer punks I met that recreate the world through their playful inhabitation of it, feral organisms reclaim a domestic scene, subverting and expanding its meanings. Tender, erotic, and illegible ‘mites’ made from waste materials such as cat fur colonise the thickly scented beeswax hive that grows from a small dining table.

 

The cat lady, with the tenacity of the cockroach and a punk attitude of resistance, is a suburban subversive not unlike the queer punks I spoke to. This abject space is her playground. She transgresses cultural norms and ideologies embedded within a Western, domestic scene, creating a space for new ways of being. The cat lady embodies a queered notion of failure, where failure - under our capitalist, patriarchal cultural conditions - of is a style of subversive power.