GAPE, is a radical spectacle and performative intervention created in collaboration by Susannah Haight and Alberta artist, Tia Ashley Kushniruk (亚 女弟).
Blending butoh, dance theater and vigorous repetative movement, GAPE collapses the camp theatricality of Catholic ritual into corporeal transformation of body horror. Marian imagery is driven toward distortion purity and abjection, reverence and refusal existing simultaneously. Through tableau-based image making and heightened physical states, the body becomes icon, relic, and rupture, no longer readable as singular or whole.
Lighting designer Darren Shaen activates the space using live, manual overhead projectors as the sole light source. Operated in real time, these analog devices function as both illumination and distortion, producing shifting magnifications, shadows, and deformation that further destabilize the body and its image.
Through excess, satire, and corporeal instability, GAPE treats monstrosity as a generative condition rather than a deviation. The work fractures inherited images not to replace them, but to let them fail, opening a space where femininity exceeds legibility, sanctity becomes porous, and new mythologies emerge.