Love is the Message: Response to HI VIS at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre

HI VIS exhibition runs 1 February - 15 March 2020 

Coinciding with the final weekend of HI VIS on March 14 is 5th HOUSE NGR, an afternoon of performance, market stalls hosted by local designers, and a panel discussion. 

Jennie Livingston’s landmark documentary Paris is Burning (1990) bottles a vibrant moment in time. The ball culture of ‘80s New York is rendered in a flurry of sequins, virtuosic pans and rich colour, with the queer black and Latino communities who shaped the scene taking centre stage. Personal interviews with prominent ballroom players such as Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey and Willi Ninja are inter-cut with scenes of strutting queens in the latest fashions and of poor trans, gay, and queer youth congregated around park benches. Through this compelling representation, the political dimension of clothing—in particular, its immanent symbolic power—is affirmed.

Despite Livingston’s minimal filmic presence her role as the documentarian was never neutral. The film has been criticised for being created by a white, financially privileged outsider to the ballroom scene, with many arguing that the performers weren’t adequately compensated, nor supported. 

Many of the film’s core social issues—queer communities facing discrimination, racism, poverty, homelessness, violence—continue to endure and are incessantly overlooked. Concepts invented in ballrooms such as “reading” and “shade” have entered the popular lexicon today with a lack of historical awareness. “The people served by drag have never been more visible,” writes Collins, “and Paris Is Burning is an essential part of that narrative. Politically, however, the promise of visibility has not totally borne out. The movie plays a part in that narrative too.”¹

Paris is Burning’s legacy and the question of visibility—of who tells the stories that have material effects on our lives—is strongly felt in HI VIS, an exhibition housed at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre 1 Feb 2020 - 15 Mar 2020. Oriented around “how bodies signal meaning through clothing worn on the body,” HI VIS features work from local designers, performance artists and Sydney ballroom members - Nicole Oliveria, Leila el Rayes, JD Reforma, Joan Ross, Matthew Stegh, Angela Tiatia, and Kilia. 

It’s a 35-degree day when I attend the HI VIS launch. The sun radiates through the open door and wheezing fans work overtime to cool the Turbine Hall’s sweating occupants, and yet there’s a frisson of excitement. The space is full of light, chatter and fellow locals, all of us awaiting Love is the Message (2020) a specially commissioned live performance from Kilia, a Western Sydney-based Fakaleti artist.

Meanwhile, the immediacy of HI VIS is striking: all the displayed sartorial expressions speak directly to our current moment. JD Reforma’s video feature MISS ANTHROPY (2020), glows like a beacon on a huge, elevated screen at the front of the hall. It streams an animated version of Mount Mayon, an active Filipino volcano, oozing a slow but ceaseless stream of lava down its surface. Filmically Reforma is to-scale with the mountain, dressed in a crimson skirt, a matching surgical mask and a sash that reads: “Let It Reign.” Reforma’s stilettoed feet are hooked around the mountain, their hand gently caressing the mountain’s side. The mask reminds me about my very own P2 mask tucked in my bag, a necessity during this devastating bushfire season and daily smoke-filled atmosphere. Reforma and Mount Mayon are physically entwined not unlike our off-screen capital-driven selves and our quickly-degrading earth. 

Evocative of strength and cultural history, Reforma’s striking red outfit references the evening gown of Catriona Gray, 2018’s Filipina Miss Universe, who was herself paying homage to Mount Mayon. The exhibition text states that Reforma’s costume will be re-worn when he competes in the Sissy Ball 2020 Runway category. The clothing returns to the ballroom culture that influenced it, where it will fulfil an original, political function through performance and community.   

These layers of historical acknowledgement demonstrate how disparate cultures and moments in time can imbricate within one body; how we can draw power from the people who have shaped us—both past and present. 

Ball culture was created by the marginalised. People shut out of wealth, executive positions and conventional family units due to their class, race and sexuality. This included youth shunned from homes and many trans people who as a community have been consistently targeted and murdered. But “in a ballroom,” Dorian Corey states, “you can be anything you want.” Participants designed, bought and stole their clothes, in order to dress-up sometimes as military men, supermodels, or country club patrons. Queens were rated on their “realness”—how precisely they embodied these personas, showing that, if given the means, they could wear the role as well as the “real” counterparts. “Fantasy is not an escape, but rather a weapon…it is a projection forward, a projection of desire and possibility,” writes Dahlia Schweitzer. 

These origins, articulated in Livingston’s documentary, are instrumental to Kilia’s multi-act performance. At 3PM, she materialises atop a staircase, draped in a black sheer robe with a ruffled trim. Music from Paris is Burning’s soundtrack—notably Diana Ross’s Love Hangover and Barabra Mason’s Another Man—echoes through the hall. Kilia lip-syncs, dances, and shimmies through the audience. She catches my eye and smiles coyly when she sees me recording a video. I take time admiring her full look—latex boots up to her knees, a glittering black corset, red acrylics, glowing bleached hair.  

At one point, the voice of Octavia Saint Laurent, from Paris is Burning envelops us. Her projection of desire in the past re-articulated in the present: “I want to be wealthy. If not wealthy content, comfortable. I want to be somebody.” Then, in a spoken-word act, Kilia uses her own voice, drawing from, and building upon these possibilities: taking the stage, she delves into a poetic expression of what desire and love means to her. 

In this way, Kilia, a house of Slé godmother, recalls the impact of ballroom history on her practice at the same time representing the emergent and ever-evolving Asia-Pacific ballroom community today.

The scene I always return to in Paris is Burning is a small moment of intimacy. Pepper LaBeija explains “A house? They’re families…it’s not a question of a man and a woman and children, which we grow up knowing as a family. It’s a question of a group of human beings in a mutual bond.” LaBeija grows soft and indistinct as the camera changes focus to a young person slouched behind her. They nod at LaBeija’s words, a complex emotion flickers across their face —a jumble of gratitude, vulnerability, pain. 

My two favourite works in HI VIS—the fashion collections of Nicole Oliveria and Matthew Stegh—reflect this sensibility. Oliveria’s line Maria Clara (2019) interrogates and experiments with her family history, cultural ideals of femininity and modern streetwear. Alongside physical pieces, Oliveria displays her process and inspirations through collage-style representations of Maria Clara, the heroine of the 19th century Filipino novel Noli Me Tángere, spliced together with images from youth magazines such as i-D. Maria Clara is the creation of Filipino nationalist José Rizal, whose writing explicitly critiqued Spanish colonisation—the character has long been seen as a feminine ideal to many from the Philippines, including to Oliveria’s family of seamstresses.

Images of Maria Clara’s floor-length patterned skirts and ornate, ballooning sleeves are re-mixed with denim, neon vests and sports jackets. The dissonance between these hodgepodge elements are harmonised in the physical outfits, such as a utilitarian-looking windbreaker softened with delicate, floral embroidery and a gauzy, spaghetti-strap dress tiered with layers and layers of honey-coloured lace. The pieces could be worn at a warehouse party or while sitting for an old daguerreotype. They simultaneously speak to classical Western ideals of femininity, the global rise of streetwear, and assert Filipino independence.

Visually, Stegh’s line may seem explosively different from Oliveria’s but is equally inextricable from the impacts of family, identity and systemic power. His clothes are maximalist, glitzy, brimming with detail. ours can be spent poring over the pink lycra bodysuits, the fluoro-orange neck-frills and the Great White-shaped, ply-and-glass structure that trails mountains of woven, yak-like hair over its mannequin. These pieces hail from Stegh’s line, Haus of Hellmutti (HOH), manufactured in South-West Sydney family buisnesses, and worn across the local queer ballroom and party scenes. HOH has an irreverent, anti-yuppie aesthetic with direct efforts to uplift the working class, use sustainable fabrics, and remain accessible in size. HOH “evades the gaze of the mainstream,” writes Jono Revanche in an accompanying text, “Stegh does not aim for that sort of validation…he vies for the enjoyment of spectacle and the euphoria of real community.”

Basking in this euphoria, HI VIS explores complex legacies. Legacies that continue to harm (colonial projects, the objectification of women, environmental destruction) but also the legacies of resistance. Clothing—and the bodies that wear them—has long been used as a site for this resistance, an art form that challenges and shrugs off the familiar. It can “create a necessary form of defence,” writes curator Luke Létourneau, “by being impossible to ignore, they create a defence against violence, a defence against forgetting troubling histories, and a defence against not being seen at all.”