One of Isaac Julien's first works for the gallery context, the two-screen installation explores issues of identity and sexuality through SM, bondage rituals and a mirrored filmic montage
"Trussed (a pun on trust) is a double projection of identical images side by side or on adjacent corner of a wallso that the edges line up. The doubling imagery makes for a more complex viewing experience. It also reflects the dualisms that compose the work.
A series of tableaux vivants (which resemble ''a Robert Mapplethorpe in motion,'' according to Julien) includes images of tenderness between a black and white male couple and the black lover in a wheelchair. With sweeping, circular camera movements and the doubling of the image, Trussed is a vision of eroticism and illness and the complexities that AIDS has wrought upon gay love and desire. Trussed includes one of the white men in The Attendant as a major character, and the piece is essentially his fantasy. As in The Attendant, there is no dialogue in Trussed. The haunting soundtrack adds to the elegiac feel of the piece, although Julien balances images of illness with lyrical suggestions of interracial sex in an effort to counter the mass media's equating of gay sex with death, in favor of celebrating gay sexuality. Some of the scenes in Trussed, such as that of the leather-clad man holding his dying lover, originated in works of art, in this case the Pieta.'"
Amada Cruz in 'Introduction', The Film Art of Isaac Julien, Center for Curatorial Studies, New York, 2000
21'23'', two-screen installation, 16mm film transferred to digital, black & white, sound
