Artist, illustrator, musician, and poet Stuart McKenzie will present an evening of poetry and the anecdotal that seek to explore the performance of self.
Stuart McKenzie takes us on a poetry excursion of all things’ bodily’ concerning his ongoing collection of Body Dogmaworks.
He will read poems about loss, coming of age and transformation through fashion, music and art, whereby he inhabits the image of his late father. Meticulous in his recreation, McKenzie constructs personal masculinities from ephemeral sources. In doing so, he addresses questions about what it is to be a man, gender and conformity set to a backdrop of visceral smells of perfume, hairspray and tactile fabrics prevalent in the 1970s.
The texts explore how we occupy the space set aside for ourselves and the multifaceted ways we mask personas to cope with tragedy to overcome everyday life with positivity. Between readings, McKenzie will provide a breakdown of his working methods, which operate as a symbolic scaffold, buttressing the evening’s performance.