GISUS creates ironic yet saturnine even macabre critical images that query a spectrum of contemporary issues including gender, sexuality, class and race. Tools and textures of demise cut across corroded images; excursive margins cut swathes across unified portraits as to reveal impostors, performance, parole and (dis)play, incorporating a sense of a happening in many of the works. Set against a background that is at once transient, or bleak, yet dark and foreboding, a silence, a suffering lances out at the engaged spectator.
A staged series, Girls On the Verge, explores the hegemonic category of White Woman and the violence imbricated in this identity construction -at once a trenchant commentary and a rueful exercise in (self) deconstruction. Accompanying texts intend to elucidate the artists’ vision, referencing while at once parodying the density of academic discourse and the dying genre of theory, decidedly “opaque, boring and isolationist” according to the author-artists. An attempt at truly new poetics of radical alterity, then… at the heart of which lies a sublimely rendered adulation of pre-Christian “heretic” roots and, of course, Jesus.
