Mikey McParlane

PROJECT:Foolish Heart of the Golden Boy” June 12 @ 7pm Gallery

An opera in one act, loosely based around Pope Leo X’s golden boy, a young man painted gold and paraded around the Vatican until he dropped dead of exhaustion and suffocation from the metallic paint on his skin. It is an exploration of the grotesque learnings of the soul crystallized in baroque splendor.

PANEL: Performing Animality June 08 @ 2-4pm Society for the Arts

photos courtesy of the artist | www.mikeymcparlane.com

Mikey McParlane (Chicago) is a countertenor singer and new media performance artist who explores states of ecstasy within digitally constructed pleasuredomes and eroticised body display, to invoke simultaneous visions of a queer apocalypse and utopia. Inspired by singers like Klaus Nomi and Antony, whose embodied voices convey an outré melancholy, Mikey uses his own voice and costumed self to describe a longing for the past, a mourning of a deeply interred history. The creation of these personae is a type of contemporary mythmaking – it is the construction of a new pantheon of diva iconography, a model for a transformative future, and a proposition for the queer sublime.