Frontier - Artist in Focus - Dylan Fox

Dylan Fox graduated with a BA in Fine Art at Northampton University, in 2016, securing a studio space at NN Contemporary, Northampton’s main contemporary art gallery. He won the Free Range Award for Best In Show for his work ‘Border Control’ which addressed access and issues of transgender healthcare in the UK. In February 2017, he is returning to The Truman Brewery, presenting his first solo show Frontier in London, curated by Billy Hawes. The exhibition contains work based on Fox’s own experience in Florida, while undergoing ‘Top Surgery’ in early 2016, as well as addressing his frustration and dysphoria felt up until that point when dealing with transgender healthcare from the NHS; Frontier also relates this experience to that of the American Dream and its implications for transgender rights today.

Candyfloss, is a new participatory piece addressing the poignant unfairness of the NHS waiting lists for gender clinics in the UK. Safety Card, an interdisciplinary print, which uses the familiar audible language of air travel to disturb the viewer when interacting with the piece. Some of the works in the show change on a daily basis to highlight key issues relating to the transgender community and to provoke new reactions. The more static works such as, a series of prints which combine digitally reproduced photographs of Fox’s childhood with screen-printed quotes from people he encountered during his transition.

American history often points to the frontier as the symbolic edge of the first European-American settlement, which gradually moved towards the west from the 17th Century onward, as well as south to Florida, and represents freedom for Americans. Today, this dream of freedom may now be seriously affected, following the results of Florida as a swing state for Trump in the 2016 US presidential election, with possible greater implications on the LGBTQ+ community and transgender rights as a whole in America and the UK. Although Fox’s own dream of travelling to Florida was realised, these recent political events and the impact of current UK NHS transgender healthcare means that the full American Dream, of the Great Frontier, is still to be realised.

Fox's practice is interdisciplinary with a main focus on his gender transition. He draws from a ‘bank of ideas’ including, but not limited to; the language of travel, protest, heterotopic spaces and social interaction, across a wide variety of media including, but not limited to; print, sound, video, found objects and audience participation. The reasoning behind drawing from these multiple media in different combinations for any one piece is in order to provoke a reaction from the viewer and create more intense feelings of the frustration felt by Fox and the wider transgender community at the various social and political hurdles they face as a minority group.

Frontier Private View: 02/02/2017 18.00 – 22.00
Exhibition opens: 03/02/2017 – 05/02/2017, 10.00 – 19.00
Free Shop 11, Dray Walk, The Truman Brewery, 91 Brick Lane, London E1 6QR

For further information about Dylan Fox's work contact [email protected]

Dylan Fox

Documentation of Candyfloss,2016

Frontier - Artist in Focus - Dylan Fox - January 2017