TARREN JOHNSON & JOEL COCKS
Residency period: April – June 2021
Egress is a performance installation that originates from a queer ecofeminist reading of the 50 poems comprising Mary Oliver’s 1978 book American Primitive. Her work sensuously describes a connection with the wilderness that survives within our bodies and outside. We offered an aesthetic experience centred on the potential of eroticism to renegotiate human/nature relationality through sensory experiences of sculpture, movement, costume design, song writing and sound.
We were intrigued by a particular Mary Oliver poem, Music, where the poet describes an apparent dream of turning into Pan, which led us to research the transcultural use of Pan as a beacon of queerness, particularly how he became an obsession of Edwardian authors to whom he represented the conflicts of the time:both a longing to return to a pastoral lifestyle and the anxiety and guilt the natural world aroused. We saw urgency and relevance in re-examining the values associated with the deity of Pan in our contemporary situation as we live the ongoing consequences of our destructive relationship with the natural world, which has resulted in new existential turmoil and fears of nature. Pan is a figure that evokes a liminality that informed the principles of aesthetics and construction.
We worked with La Becque’s landscape architects to create a stage in the garden. One scenographic feature of the installation was a bed of wildflowers framed by two fragments of a dilapidated bed frame.
Tarren Johnson (born 1990) is an artist and choreographer based in Berlin. She holds a degree from the California Institute of the Arts. Her performance practice is concerned with place making as an artistic activity and uses systems and poetry to compose layered temporal pieces. Her work spans many media including video, sculpture, writing, performance and composition. Also based in Berlin, Joel Cocks (born 1987) is an artist and designer who holds a degree from the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland. Cocks has worked together with Tarren Johnson since 2016, assuming various roles such as scenographer, archivist or documentary filmmaker. He was previously a member of the collective Alterations, a speculative group who create new exhibition and intervention formats in art venues.