WEEPING CONCRETE

The performances of WEEPING CONCRETE open with a half-hour playlist during which the audience can arrive, find their seat, mill, chat, hum, wait. Three people, Dana Qaddah, Rhye McCorkindale and Hazel Meyer are already on the top platform of the scaffold, paying no mind to what is happening below. They eat pistachios and sunflower seeds, disposing of the seeds over the edge of their perch. The music stops and the banners begin their slow unfurling. In the presence of an archive, it is a practice at being together, in this moment. It is a practice of waiting and looking, chatting, ready for something that hasn’t happened yet.

Hazel Meyer is an artist who works with installation, performance, and text to investigate the relationships between sexuality, feminism, and material culture. Her work recovers the queer aesthetics, politics, and bodies often effaced within histories of infrastructure, athletics, and illness. Drawing on archival research, she designs immersive installations that bring various troublemakers—lesbian-feminists, incontinent-queers, gender-outlaws—into a performative space that centres desire, queerness, and sweat. Recent activations of her work have taken place at Copenhagen Contemporary (DE) 2021, Dunlop Art Gallery (CA) 2020, La Ferme du Buisson (FR) 2019, Glasgow International Art Biennial (SCT) 2018, Art Gallery of Windsor (CA) 2019, MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) (QC) 2019, Progress Festival (CA) 2020, and at the Porn Film Festival Berlin (DE) 2019. In 2023 Hazel was the recipient of the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation VIVA Award, along with Vancouver-based artist Laiwan.