Gender exists as a performance. It is a system that results from the carrying out of certain rituals. These rituals see cis and straight as normative, and queer as other. The installation from Darion Hassertt is from their body of work titled Proscenium. The work here asks how the experience of this kind of performance in public space can be theatricalized, and even glitched. The proscenium in a theater is a place of transition and ambiguity, where one thing becomes another. The proscenium arch is the structure that literally punctuates the stage—it’s like the bus door of the theater. Hassertt’s work is about this kind of ambiguity: there is a realness in their discussion of identity and the banality of the everyday, but it is viewed through the lens of drag and artistic manipulation. This experience allows the viewer to explore this place in the proscenium with the artist for a moment.
