Daniel Rumsey

Biography

Daniel Rumsey is a multidisciplinary artist based in Boston, Massachusetts. He received a Bachelors of Science in Art Education and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Kutztown University. Currently, Rumsey is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Art at Tufts University. His practice utilizes video, performance, painting, and installation to explore his relationship to queer history and literature. His interest in remix and re-performance is born from a love of theater and drag.

Artist Statement

Growing my family tree of queer authors, artists, and performers I construct a home in history. I use research and literature to reaffirm and perform multiplicities of the self. Novels are as real as truth, gay men of the past live in the space between fantasy and reality. By reading their stories I embrace the beauty of embodying an archetype, transforming into an art object, and walking a path forged by those who came before me. I am interested in the double, transformation, nature as a parallel for the body, artifice, seduction, and decay.

Performance is the heart of my work as I costume myself in the regalia of fictional and real queers of the past. My interest in re-performance and plagiarism is borrowed from Oscar Wilde’s repetition of dialog across plays, uniting disparate stories through reused language. I am especially interested in works of theater that embody the unspoken or unperformed: stage directions, soliloquy, and closet dramas. Performing these texts brings me closer to the characters who are shaped by these internal machinations and serve as a proxy for their authors.

The parallel informs my work. Seeing the same plots, archetypes, sentiments, desires, and idiosyncrasies span generations, reality, and fiction creates a kinship which makes me feel less isolated and provides hope for a queer legacy and rebirth.

Website: danielrumseyart.com