“The Ideal Bar” – “Le Narcisse” – “Alec’s” is a work created for the sister solo exhibitions Love & Solidarity (February 2020, Grand Union, Birmingham) and Solidarity & Love (January 2020, Humber Street Gallery, Hull).
It is a dramatised exchange between two characters in a Glasgow nightclub, inspired by a sequence in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in which Stephen Gordon encounters a repellent reflection of herself in a Parisian gay bar. These characters are portrayed by performance maker and ogre Daemon Clelland, and performance artist and music producer TAAHLIAH; who plays which role depends on which of two undifferentiated versions is being viewed. Their exchange is punctuated, as in Radclyffe Hall’s text, by the image of a panting, dying fox. Though it demands compassion, this fox is not real, and its blood looks perhaps more like lipstick. The video is scored by a hyperventilating concertina.
