Cate Giordano

Cate Giordano shoots film, makes sculptures, and performs in various states of cross dress. Their work has previously been exhibited at Microscope Gallery, Spectacle Theater, Anthology Film Archives, Millennium Film Workshop, and others. Press coverage includes The Believer, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, San Francisco Art Quarterly, Artnet, and others. They received a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art in 2008 and was a Smack Mellon Artist Studio Program recipient in 2016-2017. In 2019, their installation After the fire is gone was on view at the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse. Originally from Pensacola, Florida, Cate Giordano lives and works in Brooklyn, New Yοrk.

Cate Giordano is a participant of the Onassis AiR (Inter)national Residency program for 2019-20.

Cate Giordano is currently working on three different pieces. The first is about Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne of Cleves. The second is a loose interpretation of the 1993 massacre in Waco, Texas. The third is a re-imagined Roman bath house where they perform as an anonymous patrician. They have been taking historical events that involve autocratic figures and have been performing as the main roles (Henry, David Koresh, and the Patrician). They are drawn to these specific characters because they all possess a sense of divine purpose and weaponized masculinity, whether as king of England, a senator, or a cult leader from Texas. All three wield power through their personal urges and whims, which they justify as sanctioned by a higher power. Giordano is interested in taking on these roles, using drag as a way to subvert these authoritative and hierarchical structures and to discuss the impact of entitlement and anointed power, whether in the small town of Waco, Texas, or at the highest levels of government. They’re building sets and sculptures to span the parameters of these three time periods that take the shape of crowns, beards, churches, castles, guns, etc. These forms are made out of wood, glue, cardboard, foam, packing tape, paint, and various other materials. They often perform inside of these sculptural environments with the objects they’re making becoming characters, backdrops, or physical appendages.

In Αthens, Giordano will explore the idea of men giving birth in Greek myth, focusing specifically on the story of Zeus giving birth to Athena. Zeus learns that if he has a son by his first wife Metis, the child would eventually overthrow him. Learning of the prophecy after Metis becomes pregnant, he eats her to prevent the birth. The fetus somehow gestates within Zeus and eventually causes him an excruciating headache. Zeus orders someone to split open his skull, and in doing so gives birth to the Goddess Athena, dressed in full armor.

Giordano will focus on the idea of Zeus’s head serving as a womb, and how an act of paranoia and cruelty could lead to him taking on the most stereotyped female virtue of childbirth. They are interested in Zeus as a hyper masculine God, with every possible resource to cater to his whims and fantasies, taking on a function of a female body and being plagued with the pains of childbirth.

During my residency, my research took the form of making objects, primarily out of canvas and wire. The work loosely explores parent/child relationships through the lens of classical sculpture and Greek myth. Using my project proposal as a launching point, I thought about birth in relation to a heightened masculinity, building forms that allude to gestation but possess a violent undertone.