“The chicken is done when the thigh wiggles easily.”
– Alice B. Toklas Cookbook

Chicken Poems is a new body of collaborative and parallel work by siblings Oscar and Sophie Bannan that includes collage, photography, video and sculpture. Each work is conceived as a visual poem that explores radical intimacies with time, and the creation of meaning through image/object relationships. Thematically, their work explores rhythms of living such as cooking and food, domestic chores, personal ritual, and familial and romantic relationships.

In their artistic practices, Oscar and Sophie choose to work with existing material and found objects to challenge notions of object creation and consumption. They borrow visual languages from Judson Dance Theatre, 1980s lesbian magazines, poems about plants, recipes with chicken, and photographs of lovers. Sophie’s photographic collages mine personal archives and found images to generate narratives of domestic joy and queer time. Oscar’s sculptural collages present material histories, treating personal belongings as both witness and relic, altered by way of custodianship.

For The Changing Room, Sophie and Oscar have made a collaborative moving image work using existing dance films made of and by the siblings over the past thirty years. The intention of the film is to enable a meeting a point between their collages and their preoccupation with the performing body. It offers various lenses through which to view this body of work, shifting in register from Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A, first performed in 1978, to Tumblr era bedroom self-takes.

As noted by the artists, “We will both be changing in The Changing Room; Sophie into motherhood and queerness; Oscar changing costume.”

Oscar Bannan (b. 1998) is a recent graduate of Ilam School of Fine Arts (BFA hons, Sculpture). Using performance, video, photography, writing and found object assemblage as methods of experimental self-portraiture, his practice is fuelled by meditations on improvisation, personal history, sustainable living practices, magic, influence and the performativity of the everyday.⁠
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Sophie Bannan (b. 1989) is an artist, writer and educator based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her practice is multi-modal, working across image and object making, performance, and text. Bannan’s work generates subjective ecologies of landscape, history and communities of practice in Aotearoa. Her work has recently been exhibited at Centre of Contemporary Art (Christchurch), Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, RM Gallery (Auckland) and Auckland Art Fair. She is a co-founder of artist-run galleries North Projects (Christchurch) and Personal Best (Auckland) and regularly contributes to art publications and catalogues.⁠

Chicken Poems marks the launch of Gus Fisher Gallery’s new proposal driven space The Changing Room. Intended as a project space for newly commissioned artwork, The Changing Room enables a dedicated solo space for Aotearoa-based practitioners.⁠

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