"Stuart McKenzie turns towards a fan on a makeshift stage so his long brunette hair blows in the wind. The artist is dressed in a power suit with thick rimmed glasses, flamboyantly smoking a cigarette as he performs the confessional poetry he's been writing since the 80s. Stuart is this fantastic London staple who is just coming out of the woodwork now, says Emily Pope, the director of Montez Press, who hosted the fundraiser where McKenzie performed to support their queer, feminist press and radio."
"McKenzie is a typical Montez Press collaborator: an experimental artist who doesn't fit neatly into either art, literary or music spaces (although he did recently support the indie band Bar Italia). He's later in his career than some of the emerging artists they collaborate with but he has Montez Press's desire to push boundaries and ask questions, as Anna Clark, one of the organisation's founding members, puts it."
"Their first book was Chubz by Huw Lemmey, a nightmarish, homoerotic satire about the protagonist, who dates a leftwing journalist, inspired by Owen Jones, whom he meets on Grindr in the summer of 2011 as Nigel Farage rises to power as prime minister. It's a story about class struggle, populism, and our dependence on technology tied together with a lot of sex."
Montez Press is a queer, feminist press and radio founded in 2012 by exchange students from Goldsmiths College of Art and Hamburg School of Art. The press formed to counter a publishing landscape dominated by heteronormative journalists and academics and to celebrate experimental writing led by artists championing feminist and queer perspectives. Montez commissions one novel annually from younger artists working in auto-speculative or fan fiction, literature rooted in personal experience explored through futuristic or fantastical lenses. The press collaborates with interdisciplinary experimental artists who push boundaries, and supports fundraisers to sustain its projects.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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