Jeanelle is a Mexican American experimental body and performance artist from California. Much of her work is not for the faint of heart, for instance in her 2018 piece Flesh Into Gold she was suspended from eight hooks in her stomach. While she was suspended, she cut the cords holding her up and fell on a bed of broken glass. She then pulled the hooks out of her body and created a sigil on paper. She revealed a chalice held up by her pelvic floor muscles and put the piece of paper she painted into the vessel. She lit the piece of paper on fire and pissed on it to put it out.
Through her art she aims to create an alternative reality to the one we are given by society, and in turn show others that they can create their own too. Her stage performances incorporate rituals, piercing, hook suspension, bloodletting, majik and the use of sacred objects.
As teen she didn't feel like she fitted in anywhere until one night she went to see a performance group called 'Aesthetic Meat Front' fronted by Louis Fleischer. In the show people were played as human instruments and suspended from the ceiling with hooks through their flesh,
Jeanelle said of that night, 'It was during that show that I felt the door that I had almost given up searching for, open wide. For years, I struggled with finding a balance between mediocre, daily life and my personal beliefs, interests and desires. I had felt very alone, lost and felt that maybe there was no real place for my attractions. At that show I witnessed a moment in time so pure and real without question or interruption by the eyes of society and conformity'.
Her first taste of performing came about month later Louis offered her a role in a stage performance with A-M-F at the Castle Party festival in Bolkow, Poland. There she found herself suspended with multiple hooks in her flesh in front of 600 people in a castle, fire and experimental audio with ritualistic drumbeats blaring and Louis suspended between the castle walls.
One of her first solo pieces was 'Contatus' in 2009 - below. (Warning graphic content)
In the past few years Jeanelle has worked all ove the place, here she is being suspended in a video for the LA muscle-mary band, 3teeth. She has also worked with a number of performance groups including Embrace Chaos Suspensions, Aesthetic Meat Front, Coven of Ashes, the Church of Coyote, and Constructs of Ritual Evolution.
In an interview with the coum-unity of temple of psychic youth when asked what the ultimate goal of her work was, she replied 'It’s a simple goal really. It just breaks my heart seeing so many people with so many desires, talents, and ideas and not nurturing or seeing those things as needs. Joy creates strength and health, hence producing mental clarity. With mental clarity comes a stronger society of people that can see clearer through bullshit and lies. And with that may come real change for a better standard of living, instead of further bloating the dead, rotting corpse of the conformity machine that is producing a race of the living dead. We can be what society fears most, the complete, non-impressionable, analytical, strong willed, independent thinking, active individual.'
Can't argue with that.
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