FROM THE MOVING IMAGE ARCHIVE
Conceptual performance works, political interventions, ritual actions, and experimental moving image documentation.
MAY THE ENEMY SEE OUR LIGHT
Conceptual Performance Artwork
Created for a private collector, May The Enemy See Our Light transformed a historical artifact associated with violence, hatred, and inherited trauma into a live conceptual performance centered on blindness, vulnerability, silence, and symbolic transformation.
The work began with an original wartime Nazi flag owned by the collector’s grandfather. Rather than preserve the object as historical memorabilia, the commission sought to confront and neutralize its psychological weight through ritualized artistic transformation.
Performed nude before a small invited audience of critics, collectors, and witnesses, Fraser physically restricted his own senses throughout the duration of the performance. Blindfolded, noise isolated, and with his mouth sealed shut, the act referenced the phrase:
See no evil.
Hear no evil.
Speak no evil.
Deprived of sight, sound, and speech, the body was forced to navigate the surface of the flag entirely through touch and instinct. Black paint was slowly applied across the material until the original symbolism disappeared beneath darkness, transforming the object into an abstract field of erasure and confrontation.
Only after the flag had been fully obscured did Fraser inscribe the phrase:
May The Enemy See Our Light
painted blindly in white across the blackened surface.
The completed work was later suspended from the ceiling as a hanging canvas installation, allowing viewers to move around the piece and witness both sides simultaneously. While the front appeared almost entirely transformed into a black abstract surface, traces of the original symbol remained faintly visible through the paint soaked fabric from the reverse side.
The installation acknowledged that history itself cannot simply be erased or forgotten. Though symbols may be covered, transformed, or recontextualized, their presence continues to exist beneath the surface as part of collective memory and historical consequence.
Existing simultaneously as endurance performance, ritual transformation, political commentary, and conceptual painting, the work examined how symbols acquire power, how history inhabits objects, and whether transformation is possible through embodied action.
POLITICAL PORTRAIT PERFORMANCE STUDIES
Performance based portrait works exploring power, celebrity, nationalism, leadership, media mythology, and the construction of public identity through embodied mark making.
Created through live action painting, these works reinterpret political leaders, cultural figures, and members of the British Royal Family not as static portraits, but as psychological symbols shaped by history, spectacle, influence, and collective memory.
Using the body as both instrument and subject, Fraser transforms portraiture into performance, merging physical endurance, vulnerability, protest, satire, ritual, and theatrical confrontation.
Figures including Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau, John F. Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth II, and Princess Diana become part of an evolving archive examining authority, iconography, masculinity, grief, patriotism, media obsession, and public projection.
Rather than endorsing or condemning individual figures, the works investigate how public identities are constructed, consumed, worshipped, challenged, and remembered through contemporary visual culture.
DONALD TRUMP
Presidential Performance Studies
Created through a series of live performances, political interventions, and large scale action paintings, Fraser’s Donald Trump works merged protest, satire, spectacle, endurance, and confrontational penis painting into one of the most controversial chapters of his performance archive.
Produced during the cultural tension surrounding the 2016 United States presidential election, the performances examined celebrity politics, nationalism, media manipulation, masculinity, spectacle, and the transformation of political figures into mass cultural mythology.
One of the most widely viewed works emerged through a collaboration with Daily Hive and Hive Labs during a live election night broadcast. Performed inside Fraser’s studio surrounded by American and Canadian iconography, the monumental portrait evolved in real time before thousands of online viewers awaiting the announcement of the next president of the United States. The performance culminated in a violent red paint intervention across the completed face, transforming the portrait into an image of political anxiety, outrage, theatrical destruction, and media spectacle.
Alongside these large scale political works, Fraser developed an increasingly confrontational series of portrait performances that fused illusion, absurdist humor, body based mark making, and shock driven audience interaction. Constructed through hidden alterations within the canvas itself, the works transformed portraiture into live physical theatre where the body appeared to merge directly with the painted image.
These performances often incorporated secondary hidden imagery concealed on the reverse side of the canvas, revealed only during the final moments of the act. Political figures, cartoon characters, musicians, religious iconography, and celebrity imagery collided within layered compositions that balanced satire, discomfort, comedy, ritual, parody, and confrontation simultaneously.
Trump became one of the most recurring and recognizable figures within the series, functioning less as an endorsement or condemnation of a single politician and more as a symbol of media obsession, public projection, celebrity power, outrage culture, and the theatrical nature of modern politics itself.
Blurring the line between painting, protest, performance, and spectacle, the Trump works remain among Fraser’s most publicly discussed and culturally provocative live portrait studies.
BARACK OBAMA
HOPE PERFORMANCE STUDY
Created live inside the Silo Art Studio, Fraser’s Obama portrait performance reinterpreted the iconic HOPE imagery popularized during Barack Obama’s presidential campaign through body based action painting, satire, performance, and political symbolism.
Referencing Shepard Fairey’s legendary poster while pushing the image into far more confrontational territory, the performance explored artistic freedom, political mythology, media spectacle, censorship, masculinity, and the boundaries between performance art and public discomfort.
Broadcast live online, the work transformed the act of painting into an endurance based performance where the body itself became the instrument of image making. Rather than presenting Obama as a traditional political portrait, Fraser approached the image as a cultural symbol shaped by celebrity, hope, projection, controversy, and collective expectation.
Balancing humor, provocation, absurdity, and theatrical confrontation, the performance challenged audiences to question where the line between spectacle, protest, eroticism, satire, and fine art truly exists.
JFK
Presidential Performance Studies
JFK — FOLSOM STREET FAIR PERFORMANCE
Created during a live performance at San Francisco’s legendary Folsom Street Fair in 2016, this large scale JFK portrait merged political iconography, performance striptease, patriotism, satire, and theatrical spectacle before a crowd of thousands.
Stepping onto the stage dressed as a Canadian Mountie and carrying a Canadian flag, Fraser transformed the performance into a high energy act of movement, character, and rapid live painting. As the portrait of John F. Kennedy emerged across the canvas, the work explored masculinity, leadership, celebrity mythology, and the enduring visual power of political imagery within contemporary culture.
Completed before a roaring audience estimated at over 10,000 attendees, the finished portrait was raised above the crowd as both painting and performance object, blurring the line between political portraiture, live entertainment, and embodied action painting.
The completed JFK work was later gifted to Fraser’s friend Peter, who documented the San Francisco performances and wider Lumberjack era throughout the trip.
QUEEN ELIZABETH ll & PRINCESS DIANA
Monarchy & Cultural Icon Performance Studies
Created live inside the Silo Art Studio in 2015, Mother & Daughter United explored monarchy, memory, grief, and public mythology through a large scale double portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Diana.
Performed before a live online audience, the work drew inspiration from Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child (Divided), 1993, reimagining separation and reunion through performance based portraiture and embodied mark making.
Framed within a large retroheart motif, the painting symbolically united Queen Elizabeth and Princess Diana through art, imagining them together beyond history, tragedy, and royal expectation.
Beyond this larger work, Fraser has continued to revisit Queen Elizabeth II throughout his career in smaller live portrait performances and private commissions, including appearances at exclusive New York gatherings such as SNCTM, where he created royal portrait studies amid black tie theatrical environments and immersive nightlife performance culture.
The Queen’s image also frequently appears throughout Fraser’s collectible Brent Buck currency designs, often depicted observing the artist at work with an amused or knowing expression, transforming royal iconography into recurring symbols woven throughout his wider performance universe.
BEAST OF CIRCUMSTANCE
Filmed, directed, and performed entirely by Fraser inside the Silo Art Studio and surrounding forest, Beast of Circumstance marked the first appearance of the surreal “Mr. Deer” persona, a hybrid man animal figure existing somewhere between performance art, ritual, absurdist theatre, and experimental cinema.
Created during a period of fascination with taxidermy, transformation, and sculptural collage, the film explored the idea of reclaiming hunted animal trophies and transforming them into living art objects through paint, assemblage, and performance. Mounted deer heads became layered mixed media works covered in collage, paint, and symbolic intervention, shifting their identity from decoration into expressive sculptural paintings.
Throughout the film, Mr. Deer moves between the studio and forest landscapes carrying handmade performance tools coated in thick black paint, striking and dragging gestures across wood panel surfaces in a rhythmic process of mark making. The performances unfold with dreamlike unpredictability, combining ritual movement, absurd humor, primitive symbolism, and arcade like repetition.
