Jez Dolan (UK)

For the past decade Jez Dolan’s practice has underlined the intersections between queerness, sexuality, identity and memory. These interests are expressed in a range of mediums including, drawing, installation, printmaking and performance, utilising the medium which best expresses the message for each individual work. Dolan often makes interventions in found and appropriated text and objects, employing the transfiguration of language, thereby producing a shimmering multitude of meanings. His work sees opportunities in reviewing and re-contextualising shifts and changes in the legal status, public perception or social significance of homosexuality

Recent work has included:

Is He on the Line…? (2019) A performance work scored for four male (Icelandic and UK) singers and overhead projectors taking as it’s starting point an exploration of queer history and activism in Iceland.

Anders Als Die Andern (2018) which emerged from a residency at the Schwules* Museum and the Magnus Hirschfeld Gessellschaft in Berlin creating a two-floor installation utilising drawings and large-scale flags exploring pride, performance, protest and propaganda at HOME, Manchester

The Cruel Sister (2017) a photographic & performative re-working of the painting by John Faed (1819 - 1902), one of the most loved works in the permanent collection of Bury Art Museum. Created as part of a year-long residency in Bury the work playfully explores ideas of performativity gender and representation a commission from Parliament (Wolfenden 2016) to commemorate sixty years since the Wolfenden report in a translation of a Government document through a transgressive act of queering a cultural artefact into a language of exclusion

He is currently working on a new body of work entitled The Next Big Thing (2020 - ) which takes as it’s starting point the appropriation of the term ‘queer’ by heteronormative artists and others. A long-term collaborative project in the early stages of development is a Polari Oratorio for male voices.

Jez’s work is in a number of private and public collections internationally including the British Museum, the Government Art Collection (UK), the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, New York City, The Walker Art Gallery Liverpool and the Schwules* Museum Berlin