Tabatha Cass Creations

Oct 30-Nov 4th, 2023, The Anna Leonowens Gallery

 

A circus is somewhere to run away to, a place of reinvention and found family and imagination. As performers, it is a traveling home made of people and wonder and shared stories. As audience members, a circus is somewhere to escape the mundane, to be inspired and awed. My goal is to invite gallery-goers into this realm of wonder; to create an experience that alters them from mere viewers, into temporary participants in the creation of the circus. 

I started participating at circus camp around nine years old, and have practiced and performed in and outside of the circus throughout adolescence.

For a tumultuous span of years it been at the back of my mind, but in the past few, I have rediscovered my love for circus. It draws on a community of misfits, often with intensely interesting and unusual life stories. 

Marvelous Miscreants is meant to be a celebration of the artform and the community, that though niche, is never-the-less global. There is a rather heavy overlap between the queer and neurodivergent community and the circus. It sounds trite to say at an artschool, where basically everyone is queer, neurodivergent or both, but it is important to remember that it is a relative sanctuary, where being different is celebrated and not ridiculed. The circus is a similar sanctuary. It is a  great cry for joy and for life in all of its noisome absurdity. The circus revels in the opportunity to expand the bounds of the possible, the perceived boundaries of the normative. 

I intentionally left a good deal of room for collaboration with my models. I had an idea of the general aesthetic to be a kind of aspiration to opulence. The kind that might arise from everyday materials attempting to be greater than the sum of their parts. I wanted to harken back to the more humble means of everyday performers. The colour scheme was decided to imbue the circus with a fervor and life that was immediate and energetic. 

To begin, we made plaster casts of everyone’s face. I provided instruction, but the actual design of each mask was individually conceived and executed.

They were then molded onto the casts so that each performer’s mask would fit their face perfectly. The masks lend a sense of anonymity and mystery to the performers, while in reality being highly personal. It is nowhere near novel to point out that we are all performing all the time. A physical mask can be liberating in its anonytmity. The performers are free of themselves, while the masks that give them this freedom are an expression of their individuality.

Each performer was left to execute their performance however they saw fit. We took sometimes hundreds of photos. It was during the performances that I realized I wanted to focus more on the movement than choose one static pose. The myriad of images were slowly culled until only a few remained.

Each piece was painted in two sessions. The underpainting was a bit of an exercise in letting go, as each pose overlayed the previous one.

 I recorded time lapse videos of all of the paintings for the show. Not only is each painting a recording of my perception of each performance, but I am myself also performing each painting. And like any live performance, I only allowed myself that one chance to capture it. No alterations were made to the work after the recording had finished. There are admittedly a few jumps in the videos either from “unforeseen storage/battery issues” or forgetting to press record, but no part of the process was intentionally omitted. 

The circus has always been a place to run away to, for those of us who would find a misfit family built on awe, a pursuit of wonder, and the marvelous. Even for those who enjoy simply spectating, it is a chance to experience a micro-universe where the laws of the possible are altered. The show is a celebration of the wonderful and strange, an excuse to gather talented friends to share in creating an experience that laughs at the so-called rules, and promptly turns a somersault and stands them on their head. Above all it is an invitation (to at least temporarily) view the bounds of human capabilities as self-imposed fantasies, and to celebrate the beautiful and bizarre that lies just beyond.