Dead Cat

2019

“Dead Cat” was an installation and performance at the Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University, recalling, among other things, a dead cat which I had found nearby my home, and buried with the help of a neighbor. From this point onwards, there was a heavy look into symbolism and combinations of objects – a series of opaquely interconnected objects existed in the installation and were manipulated by me in various ways during the performance.

For the performance, I invited my neighbor and eventual friend who had buried the cat with me to manipulate the objects with me, and we both read aloud pieces of some of my writing.

There was also an element of self-portraiture, in the drawings, photographed, and a small looping video of me dancing (from the video experiments I was doing at the time). There was a sense of self-grandiosity in the burial of this cat, and the obsession which followed, which I continued to investigate for the next several months (see #lydiagyurina)

“It had been a cat of medium size, maybe smaller than average, thin from malnutrition. I imagined it catching birds and critters to feed itself. Perhaps families or students in the neighborhood left out tuna or cat food for it, if they had a cat of their own. It may have had a human family that it lived with, and gotten out one day. Or it could have been an outdoor cat who wandered inside and outside as it pleased, like the two black and white cats who lived next door to me, whose names I learned then forgot. I affectionately referred to them as cows, and slowly gained their trust in the time that I lived there. After a month, I would come home and they would be waiting for me on my back porch ready to rub themselves against my legs. “

-From my essay, “No More Dead Cat”