Pepper Pepper on Pink’s Power: Queerness, Movement, and Magic
Walking into Pepper Pepper a.k.a. Kaj-Anne Pepper’s show Pink Moment: Collections at Seattle Central’s M. Rosetta Hunter Gallery feels transcendent. Predominantly a new media show with video, sound, and some photography, Pink Moment is an exploration of “pink as queer energy, movement, and magic.” Viewing the work, the color pink takes on an ethereal effect as the motion of Pepper Pepper—acting as both subject and performer—reveals a dynamic, prismatic quality that is dreamlike and hypnotizing.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Pepper Pepper about his work, and learned more about the function of “pink,” Pepper’s history of performance and drag, the attraction of new media as a medium, and the powerful influence of the “cut-up” technique on his work.
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A creative mode that Dadaists utilized in the 1920s, but better known as it was used by Queer creatives, artist Brion Gysin and his friend, writer William S. Burroughs in the 1950s-1970s, as well as filmmaker Derek Jarman in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Pepper Pepper (PP): One thing that I like to reference in my work is magic or enchantment. And that comes from how I approach the idea of glamour and glamour being one of the oldest words for magic. It means, basically to cast a spell or a belief into the world so that how you wanna be seen is how you are seen. Or what you believe to happen becomes true. And the first person to fall for a glamor is the witch who casts it. And when I do drag or I do work that references drag, I think of it in a tradition of glamour because I'm using makeup and light and movement and the different devices that capture that or translate that as a form of glamour.
But I like to take it a little step further, not just from thinking about glamor as beauty, but glamour as an intentional act of resilience, or resistance, or pure expression, or in some cases wildness. And another word for magic and glamour is enchantment, and that word's important because I like to think I'm re-enchanting myself to something that might have been suppressed or lost or re-enchanting myself to something that might be invisible or hidden. And that is why the work is sometimes situated where it is or how it is.
I don't identify as a painter, but I definitely think of some of my video work as very painterly. And also my makeup being very painterly. I think using video, you're going to use the tools that call out to you the most. I grew up in the video game era, I'm an elder millennial. So I am the generation that went from VHS to digital and from digital to internet. My entire life has been parallel to the development and the sophistication of video going from cinema to something I can control in my hand, on my phone, or on a computer. And so part of the process of creating the video work is a way of experimenting with the aesthetic and the process of that enchantment or that glamour, but in a digitized way. And it's really important to me to note that I don't create computer graphics with this show. Like nothing you see in the show is computer generated. It's all, not footage, but they're all recordings of video that have been adjusted either in color or texture and edited via time, but nothing has been created by a computer. It's all records of an event that have been collaged or cut up.
Pink Moment: Cut Up Chromas for Derek Jarman, still (2021). Looping video created in Residence at MacDowell. By Pepper Pepper.
Courtesy of Pepper Pepper
And in that way of the new media, it's kind of old new media, because William Burroughs and Brian Gissen created the cut-up technique way before video was popular, and they actually pioneered the use of it in video. And I'm referencing Burroughs and Derek Jarman's use of the cut-up technique in my piece, Pink Moment: Cut Up Chromas for Derek Jarman (2021) intentionally to talk about the lineage of using the timeline either conceptually or actually in a software program to adjust how the spell is cast or how the work is seen.
Sometimes influence is by queer osmosis, because William Burroughs has a certain foundational quality amongst the Western art canon. And so there's a lot of people that he's touched that are massive and also not massive, right? Sonic Youth, they were mentored by Burroughs. Patti Smith. But another two people that were mentored by William Burroughs were Genesis P-Orridge and Derek Jarman. And Derek Jarman actually shot a lot of videos with William Burroughs for Psychic TV, which was Genesis P-Orridge's band. I found Genesis P-Orridge because we lived in the same county when they were running their cult. But I found some of their zines when I was really young. Temple Ov Psychick Youth Transmission zines. And so that has a lot to do with sigil magic and esoterica, occult philosophy and also very subculture queer music and club scenes from decades before I was born.
Their ascendancy in the art world, but also in their own music world. I kind of walked backwards from Genesis P-Orridge and Derek Jarman, because I love Derek Jarman's movies. And I love Genesis's artwork as well as her music. And that kind of led me back to William Burroughs in a way.
This kind of harkens back to your previous question around why new media and why video art is and also in the context of a cut-up in the way that William Burroughs might have used it, by taking a source material, cutting it into pieces, then rearranging it to find the new or the third option. I think about how Burroughs named social media way before it ever happened because when you look at Tik Tok, or the video reels on Instagram, or any video feature now, everything is a cut-up. People are taking their moment of expression, their monologue, their artwork, their process, and they're cutting it up into hypercuts, which disrupts the timeline of the record of its event, which then creates a new thing, which has a different energy to it. And now that's happening in such faster and shorter cycles.
[cont’d] That's how our social media is capturing attention and energy. And some of the reason why I edit the work I do is in some ways a soft comment on social media because a lot of this work is meant for the gallery, but it resembles the hypercuts and edits of social media. But I've been doing these kinds of edits and hypercuts since before Facebook existed. William Burroughs, being the sorcerer that he is, knew of this way before the smartphone ever existed, right? And now we all have sort of the tools at hand to do it, and some people do it better than others, or just differently. Some people are rewarded for their reality-warping abilities, and other people are punished, and sometimes that’s happening simultaneously.
I've been making this work for about seven or eight years when my friend Davida Ingram, who lives in Seattle, gave me a dress at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts Creative Exchange Lab. She gave me this pink dress and I just thought it was really beautiful. And I was doing a lot more drag, like club drag and thought of myself more of as a drag queen back then. I still do drag but that's not my main job anymore. I just got so captivated with this pink dress that I decided to start making studio work around it and dancing in it. I started getting up in that dress and going to different art residencies I was doing and different clubs and just started filming myself in those environments. It's really interesting to see the differences in how people react to me in public spaces or wild spaces while wearing a pink dress as an assumed male, as a man. And it's kind of a trope, like the gay man in a dress. That image has been reproduced many, many times.
But I think drag or the gay male drag, the feminine drag that we see a lot right now on TV with Drag Race, it does something for masculinity and it does something to destabilize masculinity. And that is always a problem for masculinity because the rigid, toxic masculinity that requires everyone to buy into its violent fantasy does not like being disrupted and especially doesn't like being disrupted by pink. I think that in a way, I’m using those tropes like pink is a feminine color even though colors are not inherently feminine or masculine. I'm using my male body in a dress to make a comment on drag to make comments on gender and people get to take what they want from that in varying levels.
Pink Moment: Horizon (2021). Multiple Screen Looping Video created in Residence at Playa Summer Lake. By Pepper Pepper.
Courtesy of Pepper Pepper
One comment I heard a while ago is my piece Pink Moment Horizon (2021). It's the triptych of videos in the show, kind of lower to the ground. That piece has a lot of pulsing abstract address forms that are floating in the air. And that's not computer generated. That's just me holding up a dress and I've used editing tools to take my body out of the frame. And, I think it's very vulvic, very anatomical at times. And while some of that is intentional, some of that is just what people project onto it. When I first showed that work, it was right when Roe v. Wade was being challenged again. And a lot of women were coming up to me and being like, so this is your way of commenting on that and I said, “Well, yes.”
I don't think that piece is specifically about reproductive rights, but it's not not about it, right? It works because it's a field for people to project their feelings about gender and that is always going to be associated with politics. So it gets to be a mirror, a moving mirror, a floating mirror, a pulsing mirror that allows for that to arise or emerge. And I think that's the intention is that you get what you need out of the mirror.
The same thing with drag, I think, because drag is being politically vilified and used to shore up a political base using fear, anxiety, and violence then drag is going to become even more inherently political as a stance against that and that's not drag’s intention, right, it's just what's happening around it. I would say, putting a man in a dress is a powerful political act. And I think that's a trope that I touch on as well.
[cont’d] During COVID, I decided to invest more in my studio practice, which is why I'm doing more exhibitions and investing more in my visual work. I still do performances and make performances, but I'm not doing club stuff unless it's like something for charity or something I really want to do. I've done drag for so long, after 15 to 20 years of going out to the clubs and doing shows and sometimes being paid $5 and a drink ticket, to doing shows for literally 4,000 people. It feels like a good time for me to get a little deeper and investigate something that only visual work can really access. It allows me into myself a little deeper, but it also allows me a kind of control or experimentation that I don't get to do with live performance. I think of each of these pieces—the video pieces and the photographs—as documentation of live performance regardless of if that had a human audience.
Nightsky 1 (2023) 20"x30" Archival Photography by Pepper Pepper.
Courtesy of Pepper Pepper
