MELTED RIOT Color Swatch Catalog

Yes, that’s queer. You’re championing the underground. The forgotten ones. The forgotten rooms. You’re taking full color photographs of the overlooked parts. Look up, you missed something. Look behind you, you forgot to put someone in the picture. Look at what you’re missing. Who’s not here? Who should be in the room?

Referenced Image: William Eggleston, Untitled (Greenwood, Mississippi), 1973, printed 1980. Dye transfer print. Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection, gift of Joseph and Elaine Monsen and The Boeing Company, 97.56.

Online Presentation

September 09, 2020 — September 27, 2020

Accompanying Fox Whitney's MELTED RIOT performances RGB, CMYK, and SATURATION are the color swatches found in the slideshow above. Using color codes sourced from isolated and enlarged segments of artworks in the Henry’s print and photography collection, Fox and his Gender Tender collaborators zoom in and out with the intent of unearthing and highlighting the queer and transitional qualities they discover in the artwork as well as in their bodies, minds, and spirits.

By zooming in closely on the artworks, the image begins to break down and lose its identity. It becomes a glitchy abstracted digital color field. Taking this process one step further, the field is then negotiated to its most shared value; a snapshot of a snapshot. This practice of disintegration is inspired by digital processes as well as the way that images and imaginations create space for underrepresented or forgotten people, histories, and perspectives.

Poetic excerpts written by Fox will be gradually added with new images as he meditates and reflects on the experience engaging with the work. Linked within the caption is the Henry's collections entry for the corresponding artwork. Read, research, and dialogue with each piece to bring your own discoveries into the performance experience.

MELTED RIOT uses tactics rooted in dance, durational performance, and visual art to investigate the effects peaceful and violent forms of support and sabotage have on the bodies, minds, and spirits of the transgender and queer community. MELTED RIOT softens the word riot (a violent disturbance of the peace by a crowd) replacing the word VIOLENT with: somatic, satirical, surreal, psychedelic. Inspired by the Stonewall Riots, this performance research project will use an isolated crowd of socially distant voices, bodies, and sculptural interventions to investigate radical extremes inspired by the Henry’s collection and the QTBIPOC viewpoint of artist Fox Whitney. MELTED RIOT is a surreal protest song, a queer meditation, a psychedelic research project, a punk prayer.

Artist Bio

Fox Whitney is the architect/choreographer of Gender Tender, an interdisciplinary performance project that centers his queer black mixed transgender point of view. He creates experiences that investigate the nature of queer relationships, trans histories and the surreal nature of transformation Gender Tender engages a team of artists trained in Fox’s unique methods modeled on cults, sitcoms and riots. Fox is a 2020 artist in residence at On the Boards in Seattle, WA. He was selected as the 2018 artist in residence at Velocity Dance Center. His performance work has been commissioned and produced by On the Board’s NW New Works Festival and Solo Festival; Velocity’s Next Fest NW and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation; the Seattle International Dance Festival; Yellow Fish Epic Durational Performance Festival, and was selected for the inaugural season of Seattle’s Gay City Arts. His short dance films have screened at CounterPulse in San Francisco, Seattle’s Twist Film Festival, Translations: Seattle’s Transgender Film Festival, and at Next Dance Cinema presented by Velocity and Northwest Film Forum. He has an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has exhibited his visual art nationally. He has performed in work by Morgan Thorson, Gabrielle Civil, Vladimir Kremenović, Keyon Gaskin and Malic Amalya. His most recent project MELTED RIOT, a queer meditation inspired by the Stonewall Riots of 1969 was presented by Velocity on the 50th anniversary of the riots in 2019. The online MELTED RIOT digital residency, featuring a series of performances made specifically for Instagram and Zoom, premiered in June 2020 with the support of On the Boards.

Related Programs

MELTED RIOT: RGB

MELTED RIOT: CMYK

MELTED RIOT: SATURATION

September 26, 2020