Take Shelter From the Cruel World in This 'Hotel Room' With Dominic Hoey

A decaying room flickeringly lit by candle flame, paint and plaster peeling from the walls, a mattress on the floor, beer bottles within reach. Two almost-combative lovers dance, bath, and maybe fuck. The encounter takes place in isolation, the harsh and uncaring city outside the room ignored, unnoticed, unimportant.

Such is the setting of the brand new video for 'Hotel Room', Dominic Hoey’s—AKA Tourettes—latest release, a collaboration with Gemma Syme from Instant Fantasy and the Shocking Pinks’ Nick Harte. For Hoey, the hotel room is a metaphor for those momentary, distracting relationships we fall into, those that give us shelter from that outside world where we are other people: “sons and daughters, workers, victims, lovers”. It’s a place where “we dress up as the best versions of ourselves” and are able to fool ourselves, at least for the duration of the night, stumbling out into the morning “like we’re too stupid to know how this ends.”

The challenge, Hoey says, was to make the video sexual, but not in an exploitative kind of way, to reference the central metaphor of the poem, but to make it weird. “So we presented that to a production company and let them know we didn’t want traditional models. It could have been really easy for it to be kind of shit.” Enter drag queen Drew Blood, an artist Hoey says is an inspiration: “His art is so subversive and confrontational so it was awesome getting him involved.”

Like this? Then you'll like Dominic's play 'Your Heart Looks Like a Vagina' on in Wellington and Auckland in April.