Molasses Mourning
‘Molasses Mourning’ is a durational performance to camera, digitally manipulated and manifested as a multi-screen installation. Implicating their own body within the work, Kat Lalor offers fragmented views into a personal narrative of embodied discrepancies between the internal and external self. The work takes inspiration from the methodologies of contemporary drag, both interrogating and dismantling gendered constructs within society. This deep-rooted system of constructed gender is showcased through the works utilisation of colour. Pink appears heavily loaded with connotations of femininity, and pertains to the external pressure felt to perform to predetermined gender roles. Green materializes as the direct opposite to pink in colour theory, subsequently presenting as an antithesis, without conforming to notions of binary gender. It also implicates systems of looking within a digital format, with references to green screening and visibility.
Following the form of a triptych, Part I of the work depicts an uncanny environment, re-occurring across three screens. While familiar in its domesticity, the space is void of colour and glows with an uncertainty. Tangible forms melt away into the emptiness, as it appears enclosed, isolated and internal. Coated in green flesh, a figure rests in each fragment, contemplating. Encompassed by mirrors and transformative potentiality, green corporeal reflections strain through a process of slow examination. Hands grasp towards an understanding of the self, repeatedly raising a mirror in the hopes of a new reflection, while others toil to retain their grip. Aware of the history and politics of looking, there is a sustained push and pull between the private and the social; the acquiescent mourning of the predetermined, and the active strive towards an un-doing. All modes of linearity collapse, as time gathers and repeats, slipping out of sync.
A palpable pink substance cascades through each fragment, slowly descending until it hits green flesh. Its molasses movements are forever re-occurring, constantly present in its saturated viscosity. Adjacent to the internal space, Part II rests in the corner as it pools and overflows. A constant provenance of predetermination. The figure poses, lathered in pink fluid, which secretes and spills from the self. Internalized beliefs flux outwardly and ooze into every frame.
