There’s something unique and amazing happening at the University of Michigan – it is Machine Dazzle.
What is a Machine Dazzle? Well it’s the name of the New York based transformative performance artist who has taken over the University of Michigan Museum of Art with his show called Machine Dazzle: Ourboros – An exhibition in Three Acts. And it’s not just any show – it’s a show with at its centerpiece is a sculpture that can be described as a piece of trash.
Calling it piece of trash is not a criticism. The artwork is actually trash – and this is Act 1. In ACT I, Ouroboros, to be found in the museum’s Irving Stenn Jr. Family Gallery, includes found objects and locally sourced materials crafted by Machine Dazzle that is delicately crafted into a glittering sculpture hung from the ceiling of the gallery. Mirrored walls reflect the work back onto itself and visitors in a cycle of repetition and refraction. ACT I also includes a soundscape created by the artist by manipulating parts of the sculpture underwater. It’s a room full of windows that face the Main Street of Ann Arbor, Michigan, so it’s a trash exhibition for all the town to see. And it’s also relevant that some of it is trash that Machine Dazzle (whose real name is Matthew Flowers) picked is from local landfills and trash cans/bins. How genious! Ourboros circles around the room, and each section is not the same, and at its center is a very large phallus with seats around it to absorb, contemplate, and question and challenge the art (trash) that is literally over your head and all around the room.
Machine Dazzle has said that even as a young child he was aware of the toll humans take on this earth. His family vacations would take him to the Gulf of Mexico where he would watch the waves wash clots of oil onto the shore (hence the waves soundtrack in Ourboros). Machine Dazzle has also added that being discarded (just like trash) and ignored is, for him, synonymous with being queer. As a young child Machine Dazzle (Matthew Flowers) found joy in looking for rocks, acorns, bottle caps, and other materials. And this is something he has carried with him into his adult life, and artistic work, including his collaboration with Taylor Mac in 2016’s ‘A 24-Decade History of Popular Music’ (a musical and performance piece) that won raves and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Machine Dazzle says he started Ourboros by collecting garbage from bodies of water. He sorted and cleaned plastic, molds of refuse. He then cut it, melted it, and sculpted it. The trash represents a never ending cycle of trash – hence the circular design – which transforms the trash into treasure. Machine Dazzle says that we are the garbage; the garbage is us, garbage becomes life itself. And so this is Act 1.
Act II is whereOuroboros evolves, exploding out of itself and into the gallery in new ways — creating more for the viewer to consider and discover.
And Act III, while no longer taking place, is where the trash became fashion. It’s a fashion show that came to life through 13 wearable sculptures created by Machine Dazzle and worn, exquisitely and with confidence, by a group of performers in an electrifying fusion of sculpture, couture, and movement. Ouroboros culminated in a final act of joyful and campy artistic rebellion, a bold reimagining of life, death, and the cycles in between. And for those who were there and witnessed this stunning collection of costumes it was the place to be in Michigan where you had to have attended at least one of the 9 scheduled fashion shows which were presented on three different days. It felt that those of us who attended one of his shows were in on a secret, witnessing an event that was one of a kind, unique in ways unimaginable, with Machine Dazzle at its center, and a group of performers who walked into the University of Michigans Museum of Art main room into a runway of epic proportions.
Machine is the recipient of 2023 – 2024 Roman J. Witt Residency, and has been commissioned by UMMA and Stamps to create his first major museum commission, a new sculptural installation called Ouroboros. The sculpture will evolve over three chapters from March through July 2024, and use trash recovered from local waterways as its primary material to contemplate our own extravagant cycles of life, death, waste, and rebirth.
Matthew Flower, aka Machine Dazzle, has been living and working in New York City since 1994. An artist, costume designer, set designer, singer/songwriter, art director, maker, and all-around creative, Dazzle has worked with many from the New York downtown scene and beyond, including Diane Von Furstenberg, Cara Delevingne, Godfrey Reggio, Justin Vivian Bond, Taylor Mac, Basil Twist, Julie Atlas Muz, Jennifer Miller, The Dazzle dancers, Big Art Group, Mike Albo, Stanley Love, Soomi Kim, Opera Philadelphia, Pig Iron Theatre, the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, Spiegelworld, The Curran Theatre, and more. He describes himself as a radical queer emotionally driven, instinct-based concept artist and thinker.
https://umma.umich.edu/exhibitions/machine-dazzle-ouroboros/
By Tim Baros