Fox Whitney’s ongoing interdisciplinary performance and research project, MELTED RIOT, moves from its latest iteration,
Chromatic, presented at On the Boards, into the online photography and print collection of the Henry Art Gallery. Interacting with the Henry’s collection in private and public ways, Fox and his Gender Tender collaborators will approach this research with the intent of unearthing and/or highlighting the queer and transitional qualities they discover as they zoom in and out of the artwork, and the queer and transitional qualities in their bodies, minds, and spirits.
For the third and final live-streamed MELTED RIOT performance with the Henry, Gender Tender and friends will rest and riot for 24 hours of SATURATION, all day Saturday, September 26th. Synthesizing the previous three weeks of research and dialogue with artworks from the Henry’s photography and print collection, this durational performance will feature a cohort of artists spread across time zones, rotating throughout the day to engage with prompts generated by Fox Whitney. Aptly marking the nature of this durational work, saturation also refers to the intensity of color in an image. In the realm of color, saturation plays with ideas of presence and distance, over and under, investigating the possibilities of too little and too much and what is seen and unseen.
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.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
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.
CREDITS
