Moon – The Gallatin Galleries

GAF 2023

Student Leadership Team

Artists

Events

Installation Views

A continuation. A photograph of a figure lying down on a shower floor in a bathroom. Text and black clouds of ink are layered over the photograph. — My Living Body of Death, 2022, Moon (BA ’24)

A continuation. A photograph of a figure sitting down on a shower floor in a bathroom. Text and black clouds of ink are layered over the photograph. — My Living Body of Death, 2022, Moon (BA ’24)

My Living Body of Death, 2022, Moon (BA ’24)

ARTIST STATEMENT

Gallery Work – My Living Body of Death

“Oh wretched man that I am, who will deliver me? From the body of this death” —Lauryn Hill, “Oh Jerusalem”

Oily baptism, death, rebirth, shedding, body, sex, God, subdual, escape.

If not me, then who? Can deliver me from the body of this death? This death that my soul lives in, this killing of authenticity my soul loves to find again, to bring back to life again. This death that turns my body into a graveyard of past selves and past dyings. This death that is church, that is purity, that is hypersexualization, that is racial and gendered violence, that is now. That was old. That continues.

Wretched men are we, learning to dwell in the familiarity of decay, observing our dying, and turning into ghosts caught in realms of our own flesh. Who else can feel this death feeling like we can? Who else knows this dying as we do? Who knows how we live within it, alongside it, through it? Who knows that this is the quickest path to life? That being ghosts grants us the ability to fly.

Reclamation, provocation, disgust, grime. Ideological dissolvement. Moral retribution. Hope. Love.

Performance Work – My Moving Body of Death

Bloody baptism, death, rebirth, shedding, body, sex, God, subdual, escape. This piece explores the feeling of inner dying that happens as we heal and release ideas about our disallowance to exist as we are. Ingrained in this piece are themes surrounding the rigidity of Christian ideals of purity, hypersexualizations of Black people (specifically Black women) in the construction of race and religion, and the overlap between those two characterizations of respectability. This explores both the killed authentic self alongside the dying oppressively imposed self (the mask we wear to maintain our aliveness). Reclamation, provocation, disgust, grime. Ideological dissolvement. Moral retribution. Hope. Love.

BIO

Moon (they/them) is a 21-year-old multidisciplinary creative and healer. They are a person but also a stone. They are a stone but also the Moon. They believe in love and integrity and use these values to ground their artistic/spiritual practice and work. They have spent their time at NYU Gallatin learning how to design performances intended to help people get in touch and work through their emotions. Beyond this Moon is a lover of floating in the wind and seeing where it takes them; they love skipping, laughing, living, and feeling joy. They also have an obsession with orcas and recommend everyone watch the documentary Blackfish.