OCDChinatown presents Geo Wyex, Muck Studies Dept.
“Looking for Stars Out of What Stinks” curated by Tavia Nyong’o.
A site-specific installation with performance ephemera and sound will be on view Saturdays and Sundays or by appointment at OCDChinatown, a queer art space located on the second floor of New York Mart, underneath the Manhattan Bridge. Encompassing the multi-year artistic research of the multidisciplinary artist Geo Wyex (b.1984 New York, NY), the Muck Studies Department investigates the black historical memory resident in three bodies of water: the Maas River in Rotterdam, the Mississippi River in Louisiana and Mississippi, and a bathtub in rural South Carolina. Wading into these waters, the Muck Studies Department moves in the legacy of writers such as Ida B. Wells and Upton Sinclair, journalists whose investigations into the putrid underbelly of white supremacy and capitalism were denounced as muck-raking. In dialogue with Black Trans Theory, Conceptual and Fluxus Art, Soil Science, and Poetry, Wyex posits muck as an amalgamation of power, desire, violence, history, study, and sparkle. Through his interventions, OCDChinatown space will be transformed into the temporary office location of a “self-appointed fake city agent” of the Muck Studies Department.
“I move in and out of the voice of Muck Studies Dept.” the artist states, “wading through muck’s dimensional layers — affective, sonic, historical, gendered — as a rife insurgency in the landscape, a para-black transexual man.” With a practice that moves outward from the body, Wyex indexes without granting easy legibility to categories of race, gender, and sexuality.
The interventions of the Muck Studies Department, and the evidence of their ephemera, have taken place in multiple international galleries and museums, including The Western Front (Vancouver, CA); TENT Rotterdam, NL; Deltaworkers Residency, New Orleans, Louisiana; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, NL; Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, NL; Galería Hilario Gualgera, CDMX. Geo Wyex has been shown at the New Museum, PS-1 MoMA, and the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York, and his work is in the Dutch National Art Collection. He has won the Dolf Henkes Prize, among other honors. |