Window Dressing XI: Tsz Kam & Nat Power
Exhibition dates: May 10th - May 17th, 2021
…….explores ideas of blurred boundaries and futility of containment by depicting the grotesque as the embodiment of conflict between art and nature. Patterns become the spells that open the fictive portals through which the grotesque is observed, confined to and defined against the beauty of an imagined world, where there exists a place they can be works of nature, works of art, or both at the same time.
Big Chicken & Baby Bird
Tsz Kam (Big Chicken) was born in colonial Hong Kong and moved to Texas at age 13.
Kam’s family history of being political refugees of communist China runs parallel to their own escape from Hong Kong culture. As a first generation immigrant, Kam explores the outsider and insider perspectives through the lens of a gender non-binary person, both when observing American culture and looking back at their Sino roots.
Kam investigates their own gender and cultural identities through Western consumerist imageries and motifs of Hong Kong folk practices. By using escapism and nostalgia as an expression, Kam reestablishes a sense of belonging through their works.
Nat Power (Baby Bird) was born and raised in Texan suburbia. She relocated to complete her BFA at UT Austin in 2016 and has since continued to work in Austin as a painter and printmaker, as well as recently beginning study as a tattoo apprentice.
Power serves as the art director of local DIY wrestling promotion Party World Rasslin’, and takes influence from the narrative and formation of character presented in pro wrestling. Her work observes the manifestation of feminine rage and its suppression, depicting characters that stall on the boundary between acceptability and anger.
Kam and Power met while studying at The University of Texas at Austin, where they obtained their BFAs. They formed the collective duo Big Chicken & Baby Bird, and have been collaborating since 2015.
Their collaborative work centers around the experience of shifting between girlhood and womanhood within the ambiguity of gender. Through paintings, sculptures and installations, Kam and Power create a new mythology by staging fantasies within domesticity, where objects and figures become characters with inevitable roles to play in seduction and repulsion.
