SISSYMANCY!
Owen Connors
16/10/19 – 2/11/19
Opened Wednesday 16th October at 5.30pm
play_station is excited to announce the opening of SISSYMANCY! a new exhibition by Owen Connors.
SISSYMANCY! can be understood as a form of divination particular to queers. Sissymancy is derived from ‘μαντεία’ (manteía), the ancient greek word for divination, and ‘sissy’, a shortening of sister, used as a pejorative to imply gender or sexual deviancy in men.
SISSYMANCY! Explores this prophetic power through collaborative quiltmaking. Intiated as a mail based exquisite corpse exercise, in which exclusively queer participants were asked to draw a future world, each of these prophesies seek to record contemporary queer potential whilst exploring the capacity for a collective social and political identity within queerness.
SISSYMANCY! is a continuation of research into The New Zealand AIDS Quilt, forsaking control in composition and content to facilitate a textile practice based in pastiche, tactile learning and queer ancestral invocation. Transforming The AIDS Quilt into a library of queer aesthetics, this mode of making seeks to reinterpret acts of mourning in favour of proclamations of living whilst respecting those whose deaths brought about the pharmaceutical privileges we now know.
Special love and thanks to the sissymancers involved in this project; Emmanuel Sarmiento, Laura Duffy, Georgette Brown, Sorawit Songsataya, Imogen Taylor, Robbie Handcock, Jaimee Stockman-Young, Tallen Mae, Tyson Campbell, Daniel John Corbett Sanders, Max Whitehurst and Samuel Te Kani.
Photography by Pippy McClenaghan
Design by Brad Heappey
Sponsored by Parrotdog
