Featured artists include: Nayland Blake, Justin Vivian Bond, Stefanie Boyd-Berks, Ricardo A. Bracho, Anna Campbell, charlesRyanlong, Eve Fowler, Leor Grady, Kris Grey, Garry Hayes, KleinReid, Aaron Krach, Lucas Michael, Aaron McIntosh, Allyson Mitchell, Catalina Schliebener, Tamale Sepp, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Tony Whitfield, and Jade Yumang.
Preface performance, Everyday I (Un)Write the Book by Ricardo A. Bracho at 7:30pm.
: About the Exhibition :
Organized by John Chaich, Queering the Bibliobje...
Featured artists include: Nayland Blake, Justin Vivian Bond, Stefanie Boyd-Berks, Ricardo A. Bracho, Anna Campbell, charlesRyanlong, Eve Fowler, Leor Grady, Kris Grey, Garry Hayes, KleinReid, Aaron Krach, Lucas Michael, Aaron McIntosh, Allyson Mitchell, Catalina Schliebener, Tamale Sepp, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Tony Whitfield, and Jade Yumang.
Preface performance, Everyday I (Un)Write the Book by Ricardo A. Bracho at 7:30pm.
: About the Exhibition :
Organized by John Chaich, Queering the Bibliobject presents works by contemporary lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender artists who explore the book as an object, removed from both the narrative function and cover-to-cover form of the traditional artist's book.
A mix of assemblage, drawing, performance, photography, sculpture, and video, Queering the BibliObject organizes works around four formal and conceptual approaches: restricting access to the book object; repurposing bound, printed matter as material or medium; reclaiming the book's context and content in order to reimagine narrative; and representing the self through, and/or relationship with, the book object.
An anchor of the exhibition, Eve Fowler utilizes 62 books of lesbian and feminist writing that were duplicates on clearance at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, which the artist has wrapped in a custom-made screen print and carefully piled, at once restricting and preserving access to herstories on the the brink of extinction. Jade Yumang responds to the history and geography of desire by piling and cutting through vintage gay porn. charlesRyanLong creates a choir robe using pages of the biography of the late African American queer singer and icon Sylvester, while Aaron McIntosh recreates the cover of Harlequin Romance novel at life-sized scale by using the pages of the book itself and carving negative space for the traditionally female figure. The book and the body are explored in video piece by Kris Grey, in which the artist balances on his head the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) manual that has pathologized transexuality, while Catalina Schliebener's assemblage and collage of children's book, instructional models, and blank journals move in and around a plexi-glass box to examine gender constraints and freedoms. Tony Whitfield documents how books live among decorative objects in his home library, while Allyson Mitchell draws shelves of books from Brooklyn's Lesbian Herstory Archives. At the exhibition opening, Ricardo A. Bracho will perform a responsive, interactive preface, Every Day I (Un)Write the Book.
In doing so, the artists consider how the presence, absence, affect, and phenomenology of bibliobjects is heightened for LGBTQ individuals across cultures and chronologies. Shelved between queer theory and thing theory, Queering the BibliObject reads between the lines of the conceptual and the material, the archived and the discarded, the personal and the historical. The exhibition poses that for LGBTQ individuals, our personal libraries or individual books often serve as containers of intellectual community and emotional connection, driving an impulse to curate, accumulate, anthropomorphize, and even fetishize the book object itself.