"Plenty of Fish" is a performance work that explores the socio-sexual displacement of the queer femme body through allegorical retellings of my own experience, dissecting the dichotomous relationship between the allure of desire, and paranoia of shame, that is projected on the queer femme body by our admirers, detractors, and even internally by ourselves. During an "interlude" between Act 1 and 2 of the performance, I recite various messages, received online through dating apps and social media from potential suitors, as written letters or mail correspondence. This conflation of telecommunicative media highlights the callous absurdity of the messages themselves. The submitted project translates these messages in the format of Telegrams (a perhaps prototypical text message correspondence) to further this conflation, interrogating the kind of language and attitudes of entitlement exhibited in the messages themselves; as facilitated by the ease and anonymity of digital media.
Artist Biography
James Knott is an emerging, Toronto-based artist, having received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Integrated Media from OCAD University. Their performance-based practice combines theatre, video, and audio art to create immersive and emotionally resonant experiences for the viewer. Currently, their practice looks to house personal narratives and queer experience through poetic retellings, self-mythologizing, and auto-iconographic aestheticism. Explored themes include paradoxical and queer identity, inner dialogue, mental illness, and camp theatrics. Recent projects have placed an emphasis on movement/gesture, queer personae, archetypes of desire, and the commodification of the femme body An alumnus of The Roundtable Residency, they’ve exhibited/performed at Xpace Cultural Centre, Trinity Square Video, the Toronto Feminist Art Conference, the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and the AGO’s First Thursdays. They've received project and grant funding from The Artist Project Contemporary Art Fair, The National Arts Centre, and The Canada Arts Council.