Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs
Jibz Cameron popped my “post” pandemic performance cherry. In the blissed-out ignorance of Delta’s decline, before Omicron’s surge sent us scurrying back inside, I sat front row at Weirdo Night soaking it all up and in. The return of the monthly series hosted and curated by Cameron’s alter ego Dynasty Handbag felt like uncanny space travel. A familiar enough scene at Zebulon Café of dykes and gender freaks clamoring not for the normalcy the never-gonna-happen end of the pandemic keeps teasing, but for the transcendent, lyrical nonsense that Handbag delivers on stage. After all this time playing it safe, we the middle-aged artsy farsty people Los Angeles, want the weird back.
As a performer and visual artist, Cameron’s aesthetic presents as lo-fi messy hysteria. On stage, her nylons run and words slur; on paper, ink colored limbs barely contain the volume of a balloon animal about to blow. Channeling this chaos is an act of precision. On stage, Handbag lulls the audience into becoming her laugh track. The usual bummer of wearing a mask inside the club actually felt like a relief, shielding my uncontrollable laughter from prying eyes. Why should I be embarrassed to laugh … at jokes? Maybe it’s wrong to cite the Daddy of philosophy himself, but Freud did say that funny comes from the real, and that means getting the joke is a reveal of its own. With abject humor, Cameron puts shame on display. The audience can pick it up or put it down, but it isn’t going anywhere.
Imagine the love child of Betty Boop and Divine: filthy, absurdist, and deceptively casual. As an artist, she synthesizes every emotion currently on rotation. If dread is the low-key soundtrack to our apocalypse, she pumps up the volume. Voice over is integral to the performance. Even as we see the words coming out of Handbag’s mouth, the audience is made to feel like we’re eavesdropping. She lets us in on the internal monologue we all think we can put to words, much like we think we can sing in the shower, but obviously definitely can’t. This is the sublime of performance that is difficult to describe and nearly impossible to achieve. For the duration of the show, she makes anything seem possible.
As a visual artist, Cameron’s drawings and watercolors flirt with the edge of normal. Her images feel like tests or sketches for what Cameron has done or stage or what she still could do. “Mom and God” depicts a hairy lipstick lesbian with a pants zipper that is an open cunt. Taking a piss on the grave of “Mom and Dad,” the word “Dad” is crossed out and replaced with “God.” A Cathy-esque “ACK!” meets the feminist rage of Valerie Solanas, it’s no wonder that when I gave a print of “Mom and God” to my psychotherapist parents, my mom burst into joyous laughter while my dad claimed not to get it.