“Fucking Unlovable”

By Bobby (Robert) Hay

(click to enlarge)

Medium of Artwork:

Sculpture/Fashion/
Performance

Dimension of Artwork:

A small collection of works altogether taking up a few square feet
(~2’x4′ maximum) with a jacket to be displayed on back wall (~2’x3′)

Artist Statement

“Related to several of the listed themes such as trauma, the unseen, and resistance to dominant powers, this project manifests and culminates the experience of being ‘fucking unlovable’. Following the death of my younger brother, I began investigating the way those persecuted by the status quo (the socially queer) construct and perform space as a means of asserting an autonomy or authority over the oppressive powers that bind and subdue them. Coupled with this, was an investigation of the way these traces linger on predicating endurance—as itself, a form of power—leading me to find ways of giving these echoes a new body through wax and earth in order to hold these memories even in fleeting form. Returning to the body, surrealism and the sublime evolve through something akin to a litmus test, using the interior of the garment to capture the sense of a self sheltered by a social passing exterior (for example, one of my mother’s old welding jackets brought back to life through various repairs and the addition of red human hair to the interior). The earth works are created through capturing the traces of a performance over a pile of earth, that is then cast in wax to create a positive of the forms. Many of these are different contortions of my own body replicated then in earth— remnants of performances exploring the spiraling of self in the dance between being and becoming as a moment of creative liberation and escapism.”