a
group exhibition brought to you by guest curator Aay Preston-Myint for
Chances Dances
September 9 - December 2, 2014
Latham Zearfoss
Triangle
silk,
watermelon / 11" x 11" 2010
Lula Cafe
is pleased to present its 2014 Fall show Boundaries, Collapse, assembled
by guest curator and artist Aay Preston-Myint of Chances Dances. Boundaries,
Collapse is a mixed media group show seeking to illuminate both
parallels and ruptures between contemporary queer artistic concerns, early
queer liberation movements, and popular (mis)conceptions of queer thinking. The
show features works from the Chances community, and winners and finalists of
the Critical Fierceness Grant, an artist microgrant funded by Chances Dances.
As
acceptable, sanitized aspects of queerness continue to be assimilated and
appropriated by the wider visual culture, some of us who still feel the dangers
and complexities of living in queer bodies become distanced from a
recognizable, coherent queer aesthetic. In Boundaries, Collapse,
the work of Katie Vota, Betsy Odom, and Latham Zearfoss tackle this distancing
through a formal engagement with the legacy of pageantry, camp and pride
inherited from earlier queer movements. Other works interpret this affect
through a displacement of desire onto inanimate objects - in the case of Matt
Morris, the obsessive rubbing, sanding, and even gnawing of surfaces; in the
case of Rebecca Mir Grady, the impossibility of a romance with the ocean; in
the case of the late Mark Aguhar, a trans-species affinity unfolds in
barely-there lines. Artists like Aay Preston-Myint, Michael Sirianni, Daniel
Luedtke express queerness in their contributions as a sort of out-of-body
state, by reducing physical experience to its requisite parts - looking,
longing, touching. Still others look to complicate a one-dimensional queer
experience by reaching across invisible lines to other aspects of identity - as
in the work of Rami George, Kiam Marcelo Junio, Adam Liam Rose.
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Michael Sirianni
A4A Drawing #3
11"
x 14" 2014
Chances
Dances is one of Chicago's longest running queer dance parties and a safe space
for all gender expressions. The show features works from the Chances community,
and winners and finalists of the Critical Fierceness Grant, an artist
microgrant funded by the dance party.
Kiam Marcelo Junio
Camouflage as a Metaphor for Passing: Mimesis I
Screenprint on silk /
18" X 24" 2012
