By: Performance – Dorian Wood
Curated by: Marisa Caichiolo

Artist Dorian Wood seeks to glorify both the sanctity and irreverence of intimacy. Through the use of their corpulent body and booming voice, Wood revels in challenging the artist-audience separation, using subject matter informed by their own position in society as a non-binary person of color and an autodidact without a formal college education nor a strong alliance to any particular community.

For “Nodrissx/Narcissx,” the artist will be in a chair in the center of a darkened room, covered from head to toe in a cloth, with a slit that exposes their left breast. The artist will have a microphone propped in front of their face. Attendees are invited to kneel in front of the artist and suckle on artist’s breast. Attendees may suckle on the breast for as long as they want. During the performance installation, artist will vocalize to a 4-channel soundscape created solely by artist’s voice.

Wood’s work has been showcased in concert halls and performance spaces around the world, including at such institutions as The Broad (Los Angeles), LACMA (Los Angeles), The Stone (NYC), MASS Gallery (Austin), Kulturhuset (Stockholm), and Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin). As a musician, they have released over a dozen recordings, among them two back-to-back albums, Rattle Rattle and Down, The Dirty Roof, showcasing a series of doomsday-themed songs that incorporate over 60 musicians. Their most recent album, XALÁ, marks the first time that Wood has recorded a full-length work in their mother tongue of Spanish.