Performance

Hazel Meyer’s mutable body of work, Muscle Panic, considers the performance of the athletic. Evoking the imagery of momentous sports history, the bodily gestures and actions of a drill or warmup and the aesthetics of the gymnasium, Meyer instigates an arena of sweat and queer desire. Multiple iterations of Muscle Panic have taken the project from a rogue basketball gym built in an abandoned barn to a clandestine locker room to a warehouse-like gymnastics studio. Simultaneously an installation and a performance, Muscle Panic transforms the banal and austere white cube into a hot physically charged site for emotional and physical exchange.

For CAG, Meyer has developed an installation of imagery and objects evoking the potentially queer sensibilities of the athletic. The installation will become the set/site for an afternoon event in which performers animate the space through a series of drills exploring endurance as gendered phenomena within sport.

Biography

Hazel Meyer’s projects explore seemingly disparate yet overlapping preoccupations — intestines and athletics, feminism and the absurd, anxiety and textiles — using scale, language, repetition, gentle confrontation and ecstatic immersion. Recent projects include solo exhibitions at MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie and Art Metropole, Toronto; group exhibitions at Doris McCarthy Gallery, Scarborough and Trifecta Gallery, Las Vegas; publications with Little Joe (UK) and Idea Exchange, Cambridge and residencies at Embassy of Foreign Artists, Geneva and Scrap Metal Gallery, Toronto.