Los Angeles based artist DVVSK (they/them) is a multi-faceted performance artist working in music, makeup, dance, and clothing design. But their art is a window into an ethereal universe that stretches beyond the material or aesthetic, aiming straight for our neglected pleasure receptors. Since the COVID-19 pandemic and the shutting down of venues began, much of the queer performance and drag community has moved into the digital realm through online events and parties. For some, it’s presented a major challenge to translate the energy of a stage performance into a bedroom or pre-recorded video. However, for DVVSK, it’s been an opportunity to bring audiences deeper into their world of hazy and colorfully hued performance videos that transport to celestial realms of emotional mysticism and anti-gender fantasies. DVVSK has deeply widened their fanbase during a time when most performers struggle to stay relevant.
I first met DVVSK in 2018, through Scum, a performance collective of self-proclaimed queerdos in East Los Angeles. Beginning in March of this year, during quarantine, DVVSK and I began speaking more regularly and realized that we were both yearning for the same things: social contact and a deeper, spiritual emersion into nature. As lockdown restrictions began to lift, we started working on a project to reflect those desires. That project is titled “Anima,” and it seeks to cultivate the imaginative consciousness that connects with anima mundi, or the soul of the earth—inspired by the notion of reawakening the senses in a way that our experience of the natural world becomes more profound than the current, colorless anodyne reality of screen life.
In my conversation with DVVSK, they unpack in further detail some of the inspirations behind our project, as well as the role that nature continues to play in their life—quarantine or not—and what lies ahead for the enigmatic performance artist.