2017_perf_meyer_photographe-09

Muscle Panic

Hazel Meyer

Exhibition
Performance

Hazel Meyer (Toronto) presents the performance, Muscle Panic, at AXENÉO7, October 13, 2017. The installation and performance, Muscle Panic, are presented as part of the first edition of the biennial PERF| Mois de performance.

Muscle Panic is an iterative project that considers the performance of the athletic as it intersects with queerness. Evoking the imagery of momentous sports history, the bodily gestures and actions of a drill or warm-up and the aesthetics of the gymnasium, Muscle Panic instigates an arena of sweat and queer desire. Functioning both as installation and performance environment, Muscle Panic transforms the banal and austere white cube into a hot physically charged site for emotional and physical exchange.

Hazel Meyer is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, performance, and textiles to investigate the relationships between sport, sexuality, feminism, and material culture. Her work aims to recover the queer aesthetics, politics, and bodies often effaced within histories of sports and recreation. Drawing on archival research, she designs immersive installations that bring various troublemakers — lesbians-feminists, gender outlaws, leather — dykes into the performative spaces of athletics. Recent exhibitions include Tape Condition: degraded with Cait McKinney at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives in Toronto, a screening of Muscle Panic at neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst in Berlin and a commission to produce the installation and performance Where Once Stood a Bandstand for Cruising & Shelter for Nuit Blanche Toronto. She holds degrees from OCAD University (Toronto) and Concordia University (Montréal).

The artist wishes to thank Cait McKinney et Sean Procyk, Eli Campanaro, Kate et Jeanne.

Partners