Steven Frost (MFA 2011)
Drawing from the material culture of craft, mid-20th Century fiction, athletics, and Lucha Libra (Mexican Wresting), My work is often constructed from synthetic fabrics, and mass-produced elements like two-by-fours, chairs, pleather, sequins, and hand towels. Through a process of massing these components together I assert the power of embellishment as a strategy of what art-historian Jose Esteban Munoz calls, “disidentification”. Munoz writes that, “Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded meaning of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations.”
In my recent work I examine objects like a boxer’s sweaty towel and a wrestler’s folding chair; then bring them into a new constructed arena of violence and pleasure. Here the embellished and stylized indicators of physical actions become objects of wonder and desire. Disembodied and amassed with materials often considered decorative the area of athletics is transformed into a sexualized and non-competitive space of libidinousness.