E.M. Parry - 'Closet Dramas'
Join us for E.M. Parry's first solo exhibition this summer at hARTs Lane Gallery!
9th - 14th July
Gallery open daily, 11-6 (early closing Sunday 14th - 3pm)
PRIVATE VIEW: Tuesday 9th July, 6-9pm. Includes live performance of durational work Pricklings - 7pm
Live performance: FAG ENDS - Thursday 11th July, 7.30pm
Fag Ends lurks in the margins between performance, installation, unravelling lecture, séance and chat. Originally conceived during lockdown in collaboration with a swarm of nameless ghosts, now the living are invited in to share a smoke with the dead…
Fag Ends asks how time gets turned into history, and tries to dismantle both, via digressions about Elizabethan drag kings, Disney Princesses, the global tobacco trade, the history of colonialism, and buttons. It will definitely fail.
* performance lasts approx 1 hour *
book below by clicking on the Thursday pm event
EXHIBITION DETAILS: Closet Dramas is the culmination of a body of work produced during a doctoral project investigating queer history through creative practice. Drawing on the artist’s background as a theatre maker, the work centres the trans body as an archive, staging conversations with queer pasts, presents and futures. Historically, ‘Closet Drama’ referred to a play written not for performance - a genre associated with women’s writing and politically subversive material, often circulated in secret. Encompassing installation, performance, sculpture and photography, Parry’s works probe the paradox and provocation of a non-theatre of the mind’s eye, where transience is foregrounded and liveness re-purposed as hauntedness, blurring the lines between artefact and event.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: E.M. Parry is a trans*disciplinary artist and award-winning designer, working across scenography, performance, drag and visual art. Their work has appeared in the West End and on international opera stages, in pubs, clubs, ships, museums, cabarets, haunted basements, and the new series of Doctor Who. They work with, through and for the queer body, squinting at history, flirting with ghosts and the things that go bump in the margins.
RECENT WORK: E.M. Parry’s durational work Pricklings has recently been performed at V&A Lates; Queer Noise @ Dulwich Picture Gallery, Fix 23 Live Art Festival, Belfast; Emergency 23 Festival, Manchester; and Fractalia Festival at Toynbee Hall, London, as well as queer club nights including Riposte, Dialogue and Runt. Their photographic work Pieta was shortlisted for the 2024 Queer Britain Art Prize, and they have exhibited in shows including To Be A Man (Candid Arts), We Elizabethans (ONCA) and Invisible Visible (hARTs Lane). Their set and costume designs for an all-female and trans-inclusive, drag-inflected Richard III can currently be seen at Shakespeare’s Globe. Closet Dramas is their first solo show, marking a significant new chapter in their practice.
Instagram: @e_m_parry
Website links: E.M. Parry https://emparry.com/
hARTs Lane https://www.hartslane.org/
VENUE DETAILS: hARTs lane gallery, 17 Hart's Lane, London, SE14 5UP
Step-free access.
Exhibition and events are free but places for the evening events are limited, booking advised.
Bring queers, friends, lovers, exes, artists, writers, movers, makers and ghosts - we hope to see you there...