I am currently working on a dating show titled "Divorced and Desperate." It's an interview series that combines reality show aesthetics and includes discussions on various topics, such as love, sexuality, monogamy, gender roles, mental health, magic, and more. The project intertwines three elements: storytelling as a journalistic narrative creation, shock value as an entertaining and performative comedic provocation, and sincerity as a deep conversation about intimate topics. The series is envisioned to have 8 episodes, with each episode focusing on a specific attraction type, such as aesthetic, emotional, platonic, intellectual, physical, sexual, romantic and spiritual.
Participants are seen and treated as equal collaborators, and the connections can be based on an artistic or personal level that resonates with the topics of my research. In the images below, I elaborate on my viewpoints on certain topics and describe the kind of people who might be suitable for the project.
Throughout the process, I have experimented with video works to explore reality television aesthetics, narrative storytelling, and further explore different types of attraction. The poem "Dimensions of Love" delves into the various types of attraction.
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Since September, I have been conducting casting interviews with potential participants. Below is the documentation of this process. Due to my past experience with colloborative performance art, I have developed a unique type of interviewing that is structured yet allows the freedom to explore and drift into uncharted territories.
I explore comedy as a research method to challenge societal taboos surrounding gender roles and presentation. I aim to dismantle barriers and address taboo subjects, particularly around female sexuality. Comedy becomes a tool for candid discussions, pushing boundaries, and redefining societal norms. I aspire to explore innovative ways of combining art and stand-up comedy, by infusing stand-up comedy methods into an artistic context. Below are some videos of my latest stand-up sets.
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For the last half year, I have been working on my music album called "Divorce is the Deepest Form of Love," which combines autobiographical elements of my divorce with societal critical commentary about topics related to sexuality, monogamy, and feminism.The album depicts the emotional journey using the hero's, by exploring topcis such as love addiction, divorce stigma, stages of grief, unconventional realtionship models and more.
The process of working on this album involves collecting visual material, researching and reading on relevant topics, writing the lyrics, and experimenting with melodies. Below are three different choruses for the songs "Lose my mind", "Demons" and "On my own" as part of this experimentation.
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“Lexicon of Depression” is a collection of fragments that visualise the invisible and map out the journey to the darkness and back. I started writing this book when I was relapsing into depression and trying to keep up with school. We are used to talking about mental health in a very emotional and sincere way, but back then, I felt a deep sense of stigma of how unacceptable it was for others, so I felt the need to make it somehow bearable and accessible to somebody who doesn't struggle with mental illness. So I came up with the idea to create a lexicon that describes aspects of depression in a very neutral way, using daily objects to illustrate it. For example, a rubber band illustrates the breaking point when a person realizes they need to seek help, a light switch represents the black and white thoughts they might experience, a pacifier symbolizes the unhealthy coping mechanisms used to numb the pain, etc. My hope is that this absurd, unemotional depiction and usage of stock images function as a kind of blank sheet where people can project their thoughts and stories. "Lexicon of Depression," has a unique and strange approach, but I hope that this gentle and distant way has the ability to bring awareness about mental illnesses and understanding and comfort to the sufferers. |
If you would like to order the book "Lexicon of Depression" by Cecilia Fox, please fill in the form down below. 💌
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After failing in art education for a decade, I realized that maybe I am not broken, but rather, art education needs a cure. Based on my observations, I've made some interesting discoveries and developed concepts to explain the shortcomings of art education. Over the last half year, I have been drafting a lecture series that explores the interaction between three entities of art education: the student, the professor, and the academy. The lecture series draws inspiration from educational presentations, self-help principles and the provocative nature of comedy as it incorporates and decontextualizes psychological theories. The lecture is divided into six parts, each dealing with one of the following topics: artist, art world, criticism, process, talent, and taste. (The project will be published if the planets align in the suitable position.)