Installation view, Menlo Park, Artworks in Light, OK Hotel Gallery, Seattle

Curated by artist Greg McCorkle, the exibition Menlo Park, Artworks in Light was staged in the OK Hotel, a Pioneer Square club that hosted Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Mudhoney through the early '90s. It's most famous for a single night: April 17, 1991, when Nirvana debuted "Smells Like Teen Spirit" there, weeks before recording Nevermind. It's a building already loaded with the mythology of spectacle, authenticity, and mass-marketed rebellion, which is exactly the terrain Pugilist works in.

Pugilist at Best: HBK v. The Chairman, No Holds Barred (2005-06) is a looped, single-channel, 4K, color, stereo sound, video installation, TRT 1:09. A violent, poetic meditation on spectacle, sport, male stereotype, and the mechanics of gender roles in contemporary Western culture.

The footage cuts between two registers of violence. One is a famed WWF match: scripted, staged, performed for a paying crowd who knows the outcome is fixed. The other is footage I shot of my friend Mike fight-training in our garage: unscripted, private, no audience, no storyline, nobody performing anything. Same physical vocabulary, opposite conditions. The wrestling match is all spectacle and no stakes; the garage footage is all stakes and no spectacle. Cutting between them forces the question the piece is actually asking: once you strip away the arena, the crowd, the promoter, what's left of "masculine violence" as a performance, and what's left as something a person does alone, for themself alone?

The title riffs on Thom Jones' "The Pugilist at Rest," a National Book Award finalist about a boxer wrestling with violence as trauma and identity. I swapped "rest" for "best" and dropped in wrestling's own mythology: HBK (Shawn Michaels, the "Heartbreak Kid") against The Chairman (Vince McMahon), staged as "No Holds Barred," a title that also nods to the 1989 WWF-produced film of the same name.