| Stretch October 2021
Jeremy Wade
Lost at Sea with Puddles and Sunny (blood n guts love machine)
Puddles the Pelican is a broken, scrappy, one-eyed bird, who lives on a cruise ship at the end of time. A survivor of the Deep Horizon Oil Spill, Puddles, squawks, moans, and tells stories of love and loss to keep the cruise ship passengers awake as they sail towards a howl – blind, eternal, and empty – on a sea that is no longer blue, but a rusted dark orange. Choking on bits of tar, flailing, all-fantastic Puddles quacks: “Once a glorious bird, now covered in oil. Which one of you bitches has a match?”
Jeremy Wade is the queen in service of Puddles the Pelican, “This bird has me working like a dog,” says he/him. Disruption, Excess, Hyper Vulnerability – Wade coming from NYC has made a name for himself as an extreme performer and performance maker. His works, also incorporating curation and social practice, are disturbing and thought-provoking: they revolve around queer and feminist strategies of world making, relational ethics of care, zombie subjectivity, the violence of social norms and a difficult hope for the complicated now. This practice runs through the body and is always entailing an intense socio-political critique.