Euphoria's Hiccups — Deirdre Logue

16.55

Euphoria's Hiccups

09:40

2013

SD, Color, Stereo

Euphoria's Hiccups was intense, incorporating multiple video screens, still imagery, sound and psychoactive plants to create a productive tension between the interior of the Honey House, an unconscious, perverse, electric hive of nervous energy and the exterior of the house, a conscious, organic, holistic pharmacopeia.

The proposition of the installation suggests that we bring comfort and trauma closer together to better understand their connections and the role they each play in the creation of self and society.

Inside, 17 repurposed video touch screens, ranging in size from 2" to 15" display the artists bitten fingernails worrying into blankets for warmth, hyper nervous gestures and anxious landscapes compete for our attention; 12 small exciter speakers make the Honey House's own timber buzz alongside nightlights filling all available electric orifice's; pink, orange and yellow gels make windows glow.

Outside, the shape of the Serotonin molecule (5-HT), the chemical most often associated with happiness and surprisingly honeycomb like, determines the planting pattern; Scented Geranium, Late Flowering Red Pineapple Sage, Lemon Verbena, Bush Lavender, Willow, Witch Hazel, Cuban Oregano, New England Aster flower and scent the surrounding air, drawing bees from afar for a hallucinating hit and a calming whiff.

Euphoria's Hiccups illustrates the artist's lifelong infatuation with performance for the camera and finds kinship in present thinking on feminist social, sexual and political strategies and emerging theory on how the feminist camera and the queer body collide in space to envision the self anew.