Eli Jenkins' Prayer

Overview

Eli Jenkins' Prayer shows a figure framed from the chest upwards, whose face is covered thickly in gold leaf. They wear a black domed hat and mimes in time to the solemn music. Recorded on VHS, the image is grainy and the black surrounding the singer is textured, in a similar way to the quality of the audio, which is taken from cassette tapes. "The material from this work is lifted from a personal archive of musical recordings of the artist’s late grandfather, who was a prolific tenor. This work plays with a form of “drag”, both visually and temporally, to embody the existence and continuity of queerness through time and space." - Artist's statement