QUEEN CANDY BILE
Queen Candy Bile is a performative video sculpture illustrating neuroses as a contemporary form of Romanticism. Cercone here defines Romanticism as a constellation of motivations, particularly its fixation with a remote, perfected and pseudo-spiritual ideal. Notions of idealized love and the aestheticised “objectified” other as intimate source of pleasure/desire/fear factor into her work in the vein of Slavoj Žižek’s “traversing the fantasy” and Theodor Adorno’s ‘culinary listening.’ Cercone’s image inventory usurps the rhythm of the fetish-commodity: the consumption of products of entertainment which are lined with pre-digested, shining points of sensory stimulation promoting the rejection of physical intimacy in favor of private, proprietary pleasure. Queen Candy Bile records a private act of (trans)aggression acted out against a duo of tween heartthrobs utilizing binge foods – ice cream, marshmallow cream, whipping cream, frosting, sprinkles and maraschino cherries - as artillery. The work recalls the artist’s tortured bulimic youth and paints a rainbow sherbet bridge between the consumption of sweets, icons, and popular music as prosthetic boyfriend.This is post-capitalist, feminist toil. Queen Candy Bile is moving through the passivity of fantasy into the activity of imagination and intimate revolt.