I can feel it. It’s coming. It will be a significant change for the city of Calgary, and it involves everyone’s favourite thing: sex. And this movement will be one of sexual liberalism — the kind of liberalism at the heart of Alberta’s largest industries, such as oil and gas, with its gung-ho adventurist stance and its hands-off attitude to forms of external control.
At the forefront of this provocative turn is Calgary’s own Keith Murray, whose work will be exhibited as an inaugural event at the Erotic Heritage Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada. Known for his dedication to community-based development of the arts in Calgary, Murray has amassed a resumé both audacious and confrontational since graduating from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2004 and has received the Professional Arts Alliance Emerging Artist Award from Emmedia. While Keith’s exploits have ranged from creative and production work for Calgary’s Fairy Tales International Queer Film Festival, to his 2007 Transcriptions (part of the E-merge: Fluid Festival, Springboard Dance), he describes himself as a transdisciplinary artist, where the prefix trans becomes a multivalent definition for the artist himself.
In his current filmic manifestation, Trannylicious Dishez, which opened the Erotic Museum’s grand launch on August 2, several vignettes express both a whimsical stylization of characters treading lightly through symbolic motifs and a self-referential gratification exercise. Lady in the Tramp exhibits comical transsexuals dancing on the lawn of the Loughheed House in a cinematic style reminiscent of Chaplin’s Keystone silents. DIY: Do it Yourself plays out as the ultimate sexual god complex, wherein the icon meets the idolator, and conqueror finds himself conquered sexual territory. While monitors displaying the films in the Erotic Heritage Museum’s opening will reside on pink bales of hay, there is also a pivotal event to occur during the museum’s grand opening: an elopement for one. Murray proposed to himself, and will be walking down the aisle as both man and woman, married by a fully sequined Vegas Elvis, as the professional performer mimics the King’s rendition of Unchained Melody.
The Erotic Heritage Museum was founded by America’s pre-eminent erotologist, and grand patron of historicizing all things concerning sexual lust and amatory, Dr. Harry Mohney. Along with the current curator and executive director Ted McIvenna of the Exodus Trust, a non-profit California-based institute for the advanced study of human sexuality, Mohney envisioned a venue to house artwork dedicated to the theme of eroticism that would also operate as a vital resource for contemporary discussion on human sexuality from a multitude of approaches.
It would make a certain kind of sense that civil liberties and forms of individual conduct be met with the same seriousness with which the primary industries in Alberta are greeted by the predominantly rapacious, market-apologist attitude of provincial voters. To afford people every freedom they can imagine, lest it… oh, here’s where it always gets murky — lest it offend my good taste, religion or ability to conduct the most business with the least amount of governmental restrictions.
All of this aside, Murray’s work has little to do directly with the province’s ubiquitous monopolitics, and seeks a glamorization of the fractured, decentred self in modest and often tantalizing portrayals of character onscreen. I would guess, with all the glitz and glamour, a gospel choir hangover brunch and a newfound spouse to boot, Murray’s Vegas adventure would be anything but anti-climactic. There are facets of Murray’s enterprise that venture beyond his roles as mere provocateur or self-deprecating (and duplicating) glam star. There is sincerity and a will to design new apparatus for testing liminality, pushing out into the periphery, even as it is rooted in the heart of Calgary.
