Hissy Fit

Hissy Fit is a collaboration between Sydney-based artists, EO Gill, Jade Muratore and Nat Randall, making work across video, performance and sound. Their work investigates notions of deviancy and control, acted on and/or through the gendered body.

Selected works below.

19.12.15

19.12.15
Digital video, VIDEO OEDIV, Campbelltown Arts Centre,
16 January – 20 March 2016

Hissy Fit, together with five friends from the Sydney queer community, hire a van and for six hours embark on a utopian vacation to nowhere. The journey’s endpoint is not predetermined – instead Hissy Fit take interest in the movement between places, particular to queer identities. The process is recorded in an attempt to locate a productive quality within disoriented or lost movement. With consideration to queer theorist Jose Esteban Munoz’ text Cruising Utopia, Hissy Fit are interested in exploring queerness as on the horizon.

Occasionally locations are pointed out or referenced, not as a way to anchor the participants but instead as a way of disorienting place and memory in order to build dreamscapes. This strategy alludes to a documentary style, highlighting sites, their anthropological value and cultural specificity, while simultaneously subverting it with a self-aware performance of the form. Mini DV and hand-held recording devices are used as a method not only to document but also to distort, incorporating amateur filmmaking techniques with a focus on detail and the material.

Hissy Fit are interested in utilising the documentary form not only as a tool for remembering past but for constructing futures. 19.12.15 occupies this dual-space of the archive and a future becoming.

I might blow up someday

I might blow up someday
Live performance, Liveworks presented by Performance Space, Sydney
22-25 October 2015

I might blow up someday utilises the productive qualities of hysteric action, which for centuries, has been considered a physio-psychological phenomenon synonymous with the dissenting, deviant woman’s body.

Hysterical performances over time have been marked by such actions as contorted posturing, repetitive and rhythmic movement, through to induced epileptic seizures. Surviving documentation of these performances bare a strong resemblance to the rhythmic, yet out-of-control, gestures and dance moves associated with punk rock culture, namely headbanging.

Exploring the dual-somatic relationship of headbanging to both the institutionalised woman of the 1800s and the rock and roll icons of 80s and 90s punk and metal, Hissy Fit have developed a choreographic score that attempts to channel the productive and creative energies of the hysteric body.

I might blow up someday is the result of a two year investigation into the performance of hysteria that began at Performance Space with the Stephen Cummins Bequest residency in 2013. This project has been supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts NSW, Bundanon Trust and Creative Practice Lab UNSW.

HEAT

HEAT
Multi-channel video installation, Contemporary Feminisms, SCA Galleries, Sydney
23 October – 8 November 2014

Heat is a multi-channel video installation first exhibited at Sydney College of the Arts as part of the Contemporary Feminisms Exhibition in 2014. Utilising the anticipation of the fight and physical conflict as a mode of choreography, Heat explores representations of violence and its relation to queer bodies.

Heat references queer Australian video artist Stephen Cummins, particularly his work Resonance (1991) and its depiction of male violence and homoeroticism.

In the lead up to the Contemporary Feminisms Exhibition, Hissy Fit worked with their curator, Sydney artist Kelly Doley, to utilise the mediums of performance and video as well as the gallery space itself as subversive tools in dismantling the ways in which western culture represses and undermines varieties of female and queer expression that are loud, strong or angry.