Sidney Mullis is from Spotsylvania, VA. She is currently pursuing her MFA with a concentration in sculpture at Pennsylvania State University in State College, PA. She received a BA in Studio Art with Honors at University of Mary Washington and graduated Summa Cum Laude. She is the recipient of the Graham Fellowship and Melchers Gray Purchase Award. Her work has been exhibited in a number of locations including Berlin, Germany and Tokyo, Japan.
Mating Ritual of the Lumpbutt Bouncer by Sidney Mullis
1. Could you give us a brief introduction of who you are and how you became an artist?
I grew up in a military family moving from place to place during my childhood. Despite frequent relocation, I was always enrolled in dance lessons. During my last few years of high school, I got more involved in my art classes and made the switch from the performing arts to pursue the visual. I thought I would study art history when I started college. However, the itch to engage space not as a dancer, but as a maker, was strong. I have been scratching that itch since my freshman year. My undergraduate career was a transformative four years for me. The sculpture studio was a communal incubator for my peers and me. I am forever indebted to my mentors who lent their support and care to us.
2. What is the concept behind “inti.mate”? What experience/message is the show aiming to bring to the audience?
I watched a video of artist Tino Sehgal being asked a similar question about his work that has stuck with me since. He simply answered that the “artist proposes and the reception decides.” While I have questions that I ruminate on and ideas that I aim to communicate visually, what I hope for is that the audience is somehow responsive to my “propositions” that I want to share with them.
But, if you want get further into those propositions…
I believe that I live in a space where my gender is culturally dictated for me and simultaneously conflated with my sexuality. As a means to understand pre-existing constructions of how woman is realized, and, furthermore, performed, I don the guises of invented animals of various sexes and genders to build a domain of alternative biology and culture.
I have memorized the scripts in which it is acceptable to perform my gender. Having danced my entire childhood, I am sensitive to the choreographed acts of speech, gesture, and movement that constitute appropriate gender identity. Despite their memorization, these performative scripts have never felt fully comprehended or entirely natural. Therefore, I play dress-up, a formative activity regularly engaged by children, to re-enter those moments of tender growth and rouse those coming-of-age curiosities to yield a deeper understanding of what it means to be woman.
The show consists of these invented animals’ mating rituals, as well as some new objects and sculptures that are being shown for the first time. With these new works, I wanted to see if I could transform existing costumes used in the video projections into objects. I wanted to see if I could infuse static objects with gesture/movement in space. As for the title of the show, I am interested in the homograph intimate/intimate. These pieces are intimating, or signaling, the desire to be intimate whether it is in the form of video projection or sculpture. Because, that is what “woman” is right? A friendly, inviting, warm, and sexual gender.
3. I understand that most of your work deals with notions of gender and sexuality. What inspires your work? Do you draw inspiration from/admire any other artists?
I always come back to these three situations/people in my personal history. These have really shaped who I am and how I make.
a. My German grandmother was a seamstress. Due to a language barrier, many hours were spent silently watching her cut patterns. While too young to understand the cultural connotation that sewing was women’s work, I understood it as a skill that provided for her. In my young eyes, sewing embodied creative and financial freedom. I use sewing as my main method for making and I intend to fuse my questions about womanhood into every hand stitch.
b. Many of the men in my family are in or have retired from the military. I grew up understanding traditional modes of gender, i.e. the soldier and his housewife.
c. I attended a liberal arts university for my undergraduate degree. The school originally opened in 1908 as an all-women’s college. While it is now a co-educational institution, the residue of this legacy remains. For example, the book, Home Handicraft for Girls, can still be checked out from the library.
Artists I am obsessed with right now are Lara Schnitger, Clarina Bezzola, Beverley Semmes, the makers behind the Institute for New Feeling, and, as always, Mika Rottenberg.
4. Can you talk a little bit about your creative process?
My creative process includes working in the studio, reading, writing, rinse, repeat.
5. In most of your videos, you used yourself as the main performer. Was there a specific reason for that decision, and do you also participate in other artistic productions as a performer?
It is important that it is the same body projecting different, invented “scripts.” I came across this formula, of sorts, on gender performativity in Judith Butler’s “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory.” It goes:
The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it; but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again.
For me, that means you have a script and a bunch of actors that perform it. The script is foundational while the actors are replaceable. I wanted to inverse that formula. It had to be one actor that was foundational or irreplaceable that could propose many, many scripts that are fluid, flexible, and contradictory.
Reason why it is my body is that I really, really enjoy performing whether it is in front of an audience or camera. Right now, I am not performing in other artistic productions, but would love to!
6. Are you working on any new projects at the moment? And where can we follow your work?
I am about to begin my final year of graduate school at Penn State University, so I am continuing to develop this body of work. Currently, I am writing my third artist book entitled Crooked Nails: Grappling with Feminism. It consists of drawings of feminist stereotypes and journal-like writing on my relationship to feminism at this moment. I hope to write subsequent volumes of this book throughout my life to archive how my thoughts change in both drawing and writing and convey a lineage of feminism’s reception within the general public and academia.
I am a contributing writer and guest curator for Maake Magazine, an online gallery and quarterly print magazine. It showcases the work of emerging artists. Emily Burns, founder and editor, is amazing and has wonderful plans for this magazine!
Follow my work at sidneymullis.com and look for interviews of amazing, emerging artists at maakemagazine.com!
7. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
The cool thing about tomorrow is that it is tomorrow, and I can make it mine.
inti.mate will be at Future Tenant until August 9, 2015