Marlowe Dong

While vultures feast upon what is already dead, buzzards stalk what is still living.

PICK YOUR BONES CLEAN is a project that seeks to capture this feeling of being hunted. With the buzzard as a leading metaphor, the work draws from the widespread fear-mongering, scapegoating, and persecution of trans people. These pieces attest to the animalistic and double-bladed swords of both visibility and invisibility through material investigations of lightness and transparency. Alongside evocations of the dressing screen and the panopticon, a piece of semi-autobiographical text induces a loose recreation of a childhood backyard or an otherwise open, vulnerable field. Where are you to go, if there is nowhere to hide?

Marlowe Dong (2002, California) is an installation artist and sculptor whose work centres the viscerality of language and the physicality of material processes. In this, his practice is often a matter of contrasts (light and heavy, transparent and opaque, up and down, inside and out) that forms dialogic relationships between objects, spaces, and bodies. Subtle appropriations and interventions vis-à-vis real-world objects seek to unsteady prescribed interactions. He questions the allocation of agency within the gallery space in manners reflective of his socially-engaged subject matters, one most notably being the persecution of the trans body.