And the Filth You Leave Behind, Cheryl Hazelton - Exhibitionand Performance Review
Published May 23 2025
By Sophia Mason
And the Filth You Leave Behind, Cheryl Hazelton, performance. Photo by Sophia Mason.
As a reviewer I may bring too much of myself to Cheryl Hazelton's performance piece and exhibition And the Filth You Leave Behind on view at COOP gallery in Nashville, May 3rd through May 24th, 2025. One of the great things about having performance art in Tennessee is that we can bring too much of ourselves to the shows. One can get on Hazelton’s wavelengths from her installations or documentations alone. But I had to put my shoes on and go to the performance that opened the show on a rainy Saturday afternoon to best pick up what she was putting down.
The performance that results in a gestural, implicating takeover of a white gallery consists of Hazelton in bare feet, casual clothes, and half-apron wiping thinned mud onto the entirety of the gallery floor in wide, circular, scrubbing motions— by hand. The only respite is more work; every three minutes or so she deems her muddy rag finished and stands to nail it to the wall, constructing a rhythmic chart that occasionally flecks the white walls with muck.
The rags she skewers to the wall stress imperceptible labor we rely on or perhaps do for a living. At the same time most of us (and most businesses) overlook it and abuse it in the United States. The rags become sagging skin and lengths of sinew that don’t let me forget the toll that I do forget over and over otherwise. Hazelton’s oeuvre is generally emotionally heavy this way. Earlier sculptures list metal with sharp edges, dark hardwoods, and discordant digital fuzz in their materials to viscerally discuss the female body destructively disciplined.
But in person this performance struck me as an alternate Commencement, with some of the celebration and accomplishment that attends the ritual. Those sensations come from her using endurance, time, and mud studiously as materials too. Like a graduation ceremony, to watch this piece loved ones are in for a long ceremony that will dredge up all the struggles students faced and have to come. It is a physically taxing ceremony for her and perhaps for the audience to maintain composure and wavering concentration through the whole thing. But in the midpoint of the performance, a strong sense of joy deepened the raw picture it paints. Instead of cap and gown clad graduates parading across a stage, emblems of dirty labor line the walls for us to admire in our culture’s cleanest, erudite institution, the art gallery. It’s far more poetic, haunting, and generous than most commencement speeches that fill the same amount of time.
Before I know it, my metaphorical students have been transformed into graduates. Here only seconds after Hazelton has left the gallery, a beautiful, lacy, improvised, “seigaiha” pattern magically appears on the floor from her wet scrubbing. The water from the mud she used in the first third of the gallery has suddenly evaporated. It’s magical because Hazelton knew we would overlook the work that had happened while she slid our dirt over the other two thirds of the gallery. She leaves us with a delicate installation that still indicts us and institutions for misusing people who do dirty tasks. The mopped dust will decay exponentially in the gallery over the next few weeks, just as the bittersweet speeches fade into picnics and parties. A few grains of our filth to remind us of what we felt.
For me, as a public performance And Your Filth Remains provokes a celebratory seed to grow for abject labor and bodies and it still maintains its bleak and indignant edge.
Cheryl Hazelton is a Memphis-based performance and installation artist exploring themes of time, decay, labor, and abject identity.
cherylhazelton.com
Sophia Mason is an artist and curator based in Memphis, TN.
sophiamasonart.com
This review was generously supported by a Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation Travel Grant.