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Queer/Dialogue
3 September — 11 December 2021
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THIS EXHIBITION PRESENTS FIVE ARTISTS - DORON LANGBERG, CATHERINE OPIE, CHRISTINA QUARLES, PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA, AND DEVAN SHIMOYAMA - WHOSE WORKS ENABLE DIALOGUE AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF IDENTITY EXPRESSION: RACE, GENDER, INDIVIDUALITY AND OTHERNESS, EQUALITY WITHIN DIFFERENCES, WITH A FOCUS ON THE BODY AS EXPRESSIVE TERRAIN.
The artists represent distinct voices across a spectrum of media, reflecting diversity in identity expression where it intersects with contemporary political, social and economic issues, always relevant but particularly charged at this moment.
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Devan Shimoyama
Potted, 2018
At the heart of this project is the celebration of each artist as an individual first and foremost. Rather than gather a broad survey with one or two pieces by many artists, we present these artists in solo presentations side-by-side, creating a multidimensional dialogue, using the term queer as a catalyst.
Queer is not a term restricted to the definition of a particular sexuality, but rather fractured and constantly shifting. To identify as queer means to be consistently and very consciously working from a place of anti-oppression and therefore to be listening, hearing, and making room for the voices of others around us and to be challenging the assumptions of the status quo.
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Christina Quarles
A Head of Ourselves (Lez We Get), 2019
There is not, and never will be, complete alignment among queers, but there is room for dialogue in places of intersection that can help with learning and teaching — the core of Grinnell College’s mission — especially beyond queer-identifying communities. Ultimately, ‘queer’ is never comfortable with limitations in its definition.
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Scroll down to experience both the works and the words of the artists in the exhibition.
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Jordan King
she/her/hers -
I stand joyously at the confluence of drag culture and trans identity, historically a liminal, transitional space, but one which holds incredible beauty and promise for a trans celebratory future.
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If you were not aware that I am transgender because you are reading this statement, would you have presumed that I am a cis-gender woman? What feelings does this awareness stir?
These photos were taken over the course of the two years in which I began my medical transition. Using this term presumes the reader understands the ways in which trans people in the 20th century transition, or begin expressing, living and perhaps modifying physical characteristics to inhabit a gender identity other than the one assigned at birth.
Although I transitioned comparatively young for that time period (age 18, which was less common at that time) and did not develop characteristics that might be associated with the gender I was assigned at birth, I still underwent a medical transition which involved a diagnosis from a psychiatrist in order to be prescribed hormones, and other changes made to my body’s physiology. In viewing these photos as a series, although they are not intended to be viewed chronologically, the viewer will no doubt be scrutinizing my appearance for these changes. Some are evident, some are not. Part of stage performance is an awareness of this scrutiny. My gradual medical transition process was done publicly and in the view of audiences, and as a result I acknowledge and anticipate the scrutiny. I also seek to challenge the viewer in their presumption that trans identity is based solely on physical presentation and visible gender-defining characteristics. If you were not aware that I am transgender because you are reading this statement, would you have presumed that I am a cis-gender woman? What feelings does this awareness stir?
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GOODBYE NEW YORK
It had served as home to a revolving door of underground New York queer artists for over forty years, which I sensed almost as soon as I entered it for the first time. Performers, musicians, choreographers, drag queens, and many others had passed through in the forty years prior.
I resided in New York from 2017 until March 2020, when I was forced to leave abruptly due to the worsening COVID19 pandemic. The spacious Greenwich Village apartment I lived in in New York had an important history. It had been occupied by the same leaseholder since 1978. Structurally, the apartment itself was virtually untouched from the 1970s, which created a certain magic to it, however much of the surface upkeep had been neglected.
It had served as home to a revolving door of underground New York queer artists for over forty years, which I sensed almost as soon as I entered it for the first time. Performers, musicians, choreographers, drag queens, and many others had passed through in the forty years prior. The primary tenant and sole leaseholder for that forty years was an underground star in their own right, they had been part of the earliest incarnation of the drag festival Wigstock in the mid 1980s, and was a member of numerous other New York theatre and music circles. One resident of the apartment in the 1980s was someone I had heard of, a cabaret performer who publicly identified as transgender at a time when the term was not known or used whatsoever. Although I had known of her for many years, it’s unlikely many others would know her now outside of longtime New York nightlife participants.
This film was made over the duration of my last six months living in the apartment. At the time I had no sense that I would be forced to leave suddenly, I simply sought to document the process of rejuvenating, on a surface level, the visible surfaces of the apartment which I treasured. I knew I would have to leave eventually, the property management company aggressively sought to remove me following the sudden passing of the primary tenant due to longstanding health complications.
This film is a sad farewell. I laboured over six months to restore the apartment. I have no regret for the work invested, during my final weeks there I was able to share the space with a few people very close to me. I was also able to appropriately and respectfully close the chapter on the apartment’s history, which has since been completely gutted.
Although viewers may wonder, wasn’t I eliminating the distinct characteristics and heritage of the space, the cracked plaster, faded paint, the single wallpapered wall? When I view this footage now I take some solace in the knowledge that the space was left completely bare once it was vacated. The was no trace of it’s queer underground history, and no opportunity for the building owners to purposefully demolish the history, which they likely would have done had I not lived there when the primary tenant passed.
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JEREMY LAING
he/him/his -
Jeremy Laing
"Baby’s First Mood Bod” – my poetry dealer, 2019
But here I must affirm that queers are not broken, as a holey sock is, though they are often paranoically interpellated as such, and that to darn a holey sock is, in my practice, not a repair but an opportunity to make its queerness more gloriously visible...
"Far from being worthless, a holey sock has a lot of life left, perhaps even a uniquely gorgeous life, and maybe this is why they seem to me worth holding on to. For at least a decade, I have been stowing my household’s holey socks in a bag in the bottom of my closet, and there, in the shadows, they have assembled into quite a community waiting for something like what José Esteban Muñoz calls, in the subtitle to his book Cruising Utopia, “The Then and There of Queer Futurity.” Left exhausted but wanting by the rigours of academic rule last semester, my hands found their way to darning these holey socks over the winter break, which, conjunctively, while being what I see as more of a queer embellishment than a normative repair for my socks, was reparative for me."
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Introduction to the exhibition "Virginia's Room" at Paul Petro Gallery, Toronto, June 2019
The lady was a tramp. Not that Virginia was much of a lady, mind you. Anyway, she started life on Queen St. West at a grittier time before Jeff Stober opened his kingdom at the Drake, and before Christina Zeidler opened her queendom at the Gladstone. A time before Ossington was Williamsburg North and before selfies were a thing, if you know what I mean.
Back in 2003, Virginia went looking for a suitable abode to flaunt her questionable peccadilloes and, as luck would have it, she met Andrew Harwood. The goddess works in mysterious ways! Along with Keith Cole and Richard Vaughan, Andrew was one of Three Evil Queens you’d see casting their spells at Vazaleen, Will Munro’s legendary queer party. Naturally, I mean “Evil” in the best possible sense. Andrew once fucked a watermelon onstage at Lee’s Palace, if that’s any indication. Anyway, Virginia met Andrew, and it turned out he was running a gallery called Zsa Zsa across the street from CAMH. Virginia was duly impressed.
Dominant artiste that she is, Virginia immediately put her minions Jeremy and Will to work, and that summer the boys were elbow-deep in glitter. You know the adage that glitter is the herpes of the craft-world? The way you’ll find glitter on your couch, glitter in your bathtub, glitter in your butt-crack for weeks after a heavy session? Well, the boys had a bad case of it.
Everything had to be perfect. Each sequin in place, each orifice gloriously pearled, each protrusion marvellously sheathed in lace. Virginia Puff-Paint looked approvingly at her creation. She was building an empire – a pleasure-dome of earthly delights. First was the Wall of Virginia Puff-Paint at Zsa Zsa in September 2003. Then came the Pavilion of Virginia Puff-Paint at AGYU in 2004. The flesh is weak, but the spirit lives on.
As you enter Virginia’s Room, feel the way her sissy-ness overwhelms your masc4masc sensibilities (if you have any). Savour the way she consensually and delicately dilates your psyche, as you make yourself comfortable in her boudoir – you, who’ve found this sacred space. Drink it in. Avail yourself of her energies.
They say an army of lovers will never be defeated, and this much of what I tell you is true. Drink it all in. You’re gonna need your strength and your magic powers for the battles unfolding around us.
-Luis Jacob
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Featured works by Jeremy Laing
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Home ▵ King ▵ Laing ▵ Langberg ▿ Opie ▿ Quarles ▿ Sepuya ▿ Shimoyama ▿
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Doron Langberg
he/him/his -
I really believe that we work from our experience...
"...and that's kind of our default mode. I think that the responsibility, or burden, or however you want to ... Or privilege, is to be true to that and reflect that in the most honest and direct way. And I think that the times where I feel like people are betraying their responsibility is when they don't work from their experience or they assume that their experience is universal. Or when they are evasive about who they are and what they are. I think that, to me, is an important point. When queer artists make bro abstract paintings it upsets me because it's like, why are you claiming neutrality when neutrality just means straightness or heteronormativity? You know what I mean? I think this kind of acknowledgement that we all have a position, and that position is colored by our experience, to me, is where the responsibility lies. More so then this affiliation or that affiliation."
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Listen to an Interview with Doron Langberg
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Featured works by Doron Langberg
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CATHERINE OPIE
she/her/hers -
I'm not interested in a singular identity.
"I'm a human being with a lot of ideas in my mind... I'm looking at the world and trying to answer these various questions that come into my mind about how we function as human beings and society and I'm beginning to craft work and relationship to those internal questions. They certainly come from a question of a queer body in terms of my own identity, but that doesn't mean that that's the only identity that I operate from.... I am still a daughter from the Midwest, from a conservative Republican family, and you can't erase all of that. I think that the way I'm most interested in ideas about identity is the acknowledgment of, and creating visibility for, an identity that I am quite proud of. It's about being out, and how hard it was to come out, but also to make sure that that's not the only entry point in relationship with the things that I think about or care about in terms of mapping out communities and society."
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The Modernist, I feel is all of my ideas that have encompassed my work in the last 30 years.
Catherine Opie: You have architecture, you have income disparity, you have Pig Pen's body — I have been making images of Pig Pen's body since 1980, the late 1980s, and he's a dear, dear friend. I wanted to show a piece that was of the moment, of what people are thinking about now. And I wanted the queer body to exist in a space without saying "this is a queer body." I felt that The Modernist was the newest work that I had made that felt like it encompassed all of these ideas in relationship to other bodies of my work.
Daniel Strong: It's almost like a premonition. When you made this work, you had no idea that this was the world we were going to be living in.
Catherine Opie: Well, yeah. And the film Parasite came out and then won an Oscar. The Modernist was grappling with the exact same things that were laid out in that film. Except this is about artists, and it's also in conversation with Chris Marker's La Jetée, which was about fear of the future. This is about the longing of the past, but the recent past. And now we're even at a deeper longing of the past with this weird nostalgia. It's what the current body of work is trying to do, which I call Rhetorical Landscapes. You hope, as an artist, that you engage in a long conversation with your own ideas, as you traverse through multiple bodies of work.
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Listen to an Interview with Catherine Opie
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Watch a documentary film by Sini Anderson
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Featured works by Catherine Opie
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Home ▵ King ▵ Laing ▵ Langberg ▵ Opie ▵ Quarles ▿ Sepuya ▿ Shimoyama ▿
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Christina Quarles
she/her/hers -
Listen to an Interview with Christina Quarles
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Featured works by Christina Quarles
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Home ▵ King ▵ Laing ▵ Langberg ▵ Opie ▵ Quarles ▵ Sepuya ▿ Shimoyama ▿
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Paul Mpagi Sepuya
he/him/his -
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Figure (_2100934), 2017
I will never forget that feeling of being young and looking out and identifying particular artists and finding a sense of recognition, but people can easily shut the book on that.
So you have to say, okay, that's where queerness is in my work, the apparatus and how it is used is the thing. Maybe we might be queer people using it or whatever but I want that to be there when the conversation has turned to something else and our pictures to still be in the room because you can't talk about photography without them."
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For me, the work is about asserting queerness.
"The thing that I'm interested in is asserting queerness as fundamental to the formation of photography, and looking at the things that the medium can attempt to hold on to; what it reveals as constructions of a set of desires that have been put together through technology, looking more closely at what we choose to look at, how we look at it, and how we find ourselves in relationship to it.
All the other stuff, I don't care about, because there's all these waves of exhibitions around identity. When I talk to friends or mentors who are older and have gone through the clusters of the late 80s, the early 90s, or the early 2000s. The backlash was late 90s or early 2000s. When I was in school, identity politics work was so out, and then came this moment that we're in where it's like everyone wants QTPOC artists. We just keep adding new acronyms or...what do you call them? Is acronym the word, I don't know."
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Listen to an Interview with Paul Mpagi Sepuya
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Featured works by Paul Mpagi Sepuya
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Home ▵ King ▵ Laing ▵ Langberg ▵ Opie ▵ Quarles ▵ Sepuya ▵ Shimoyama ▿
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Devan Shimoyama
he/him/his -
Not all artists who are in some kind of capital O "othered" community have to make everything through that lens to service or educate everybody else on something....
"People who are in communities that are subjugated or are highly politicized in a multitude of ways and under oppression can make work about a multitude of things.... We’re multifaceted, and it doesn't have to come out of a place of trauma. I think that is also really important to see."
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I don't depict black figures in pain.
I'm not interested in seeing more of those images circulate throughout the world. I think they bring a lot of trauma and they circulate enough through social media. In works like For Tamir, it's a way for me to celebrate their life, and bring attention to the tragedy that was their death, without disrespecting their family and loved ones by pumping more of these images out and hurting other Black people by reiterating it.
I think it's important to try to have these dialogues about this but not have the majority of images you see of Black people, or Black trans women, or any of these people being dead or memorialized. I don't think that's something I'm interested in. So I'm thinking more about representing people's bodies; how I want to celebrate and put out more images that are positive of those people that we so often think of as just automatically dead in our minds.
I want to see more living happening.
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Listen to an Interview with Devan Shimoyama
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Featured works by Devan Shimoyama
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Home ▵ King ▵ Laing ▵ Langberg ▵ Opie ▵ Quarles ▵ Sepuya ▵ Shimoyama ▵
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About the Curators
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DANIEL STRONG
He/him/his
Daniel Strong has been Associate Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the Grinnell College Museum of Art since 1999. He holds master’s degrees in art history from Williams College/Clark Art Institute and Princeton University.
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Greg Manuel
He/him/his
Greg is an independent curator with over 20 years experience in the art world including 12 years working at one of the most successful contemporary galleries in Canada. He is Co-Director of CArt Caribbean Art Fair and is currently a member of the Curatorial Advisory Committee for BAND Gallery (Toronto CA).
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Queer/Dialogue
3 September — 11 December 2021Grinnell College Museum of Art
Current viewing_room