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S O C A Z BI TS T N S E I T M R E A AT ST & f.
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ALLIE SHYER Allie Shyer is a Queer writer and visual artist living in New York. Her work focuses on the shifting and interrelated landscapes of nature, the body and identity.
The poem Wet Country explores the body as a queered landscape in a continuous cycle of death and rebirth, a unity of discrete organisms in symbiosis, and ultimately a uncanny and self-fulfilling erotic nodule. The body as forest, the body as wetland, the body
as wet country, the mysterious and ultimate familiarity of the exterior metaphor. The body, the earth, we are fecund and indiscreet metaphors for one-another.
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ANNA SHOWERS-CRUSER Anna Showers-Cruser (BFA, Maryland Institute College of Art) is a visual artist working in Richmond, Virginia. Her work, while multifarious in nature, draws on the material nature of paint to address themes of queerness in the abstract, uncanny, intimate, and public Body. My current practice is an investigation into how we queer bodies: that is, the ways we reflexively define Self and the Other. I am particularly interested in challenging our framing of biological sex, sexual identity, and gender expression as presumed binary systems. Such polarization vilifies ambiguity and represses our natural curiosity for the body. Aesthetically, my work teases our corporeality by employing an array of pigments and surfaces, materials chosen for their tactility. Through the process of layering, material encapsulates meaning and preserves memory. Revealing and concealing color parallels the varied presence of our gendered bodies—at times vestigial, barely peeking
through, while blaringly loud at others. The uncanny familiarity of ambiguous forms and textures may delight or disgust, but the pull of suggestion often takes a more powerful hold on the viewer than an outright answer. Though rarely explicit, the works invite response to psychosocial body constructs. How do we reconcile our most intimate material selves with the pressure to situate our bodies in the framework of social acceptance? Ever present in my work is the aim to freely and playfully examine the abstract intersections of personal biology and social identity, honoring our quirks and colorful contradictions.
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HANNAH COOK Hannah Cook is an interdisciplinary artist from Sag Harbor, New York who is primarily interested in site-specific scenic design, performance art, and found object sculpture. She is studying Set Design, Performance Studies, and Studio Art at Muhlenberg College and will graduate with a BA in 2014. Her work has been published in Muses, Muhlenberg’s premier art and literary magazine, in 2012 and 2013. She is a founding member of Muhlenberg Theatre Association’s An Artist Collective, an interdisciplinary, experimental performance ensemble inspired by groups like Forced Entertainment (UK) and The TEAM (NYC). I began this series while reading Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by Performance Studies activist, Jose Muñoz. In the book, Muñoz breaks down the static nature of current, pragmatic LGBT issues in favor of a movement that engages the present to imagine a future queer utopia that is “not yet here.” Around the same time, I was inspired by a short viral video of man asking a group of anti-gay-rights protesters, “When did you choose to be straight?” to which they were all baffled. To say I had queerness on the brain as a part of my not-so-distant future would be an understatement. While You Weren’t Paying Attention is the first piece in a series to try to answer that question and to start thinking more critically about the future of sexuality. Thinking about my own straightness as I build stripes into
the composition clearly leads to one kind of beauty. Meanwhile and as a result of that intentional, imposed order, an accidental but beautiful feature of the piece slowly exposes itself. The realization that another side of the canvas exists is what really helps me answer the question posed above; finding that side convinces me of my own position of unawareness in the implied moment of choice. I construct these pieces both through willful interaction with the world around me and by happenstance. In this way the complete work extends beyond my own consciousness and into the realm of social norms and institutions that create the individual, often without their knowledge of it.
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HIBA ALI & ALE-ALE Hiba Ali was born in Karachi, Pakistan and grew up in Chicago, Illinois. She is a recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a dual degree in Fine Arts with an emphasis in Film, Video, New Media & Animation and Bachelor of Arts in Visual Critical Studies. Her work can be viewed at hibaali.info and her personal twitter is @hibz_a. My name is Alejandra but I go by Ale-Ale and I’m interested in dissecting and discussing identity, gender, Latin America, language and art. I’m currently continuing a research project that began in Chile, research navigates identity and collective memory through graffiti culture. For this article, we utilized the mode of conversation, one that allows us to delve deeper into discourse around desire. We purposefully didn't want to define desire as it is a subjective prescription of how one inhabits space within situational loci. These vantage points are illustrated by the type of language and form used to articulate the discussion. The pendulating pass of language
between conversational to the the analytic, the interchange of audio and the text. The passage between body to the voice, the concrete inhabitation of the former into the latter. The voice adds a personification of the individual but can be divorced from the physical body, it is with this shifting agonism that desire is communicated.
Concepts from Desire is available for listening through the online version of Issue# 4: Never Satisfied
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JOSEPH R. VARISCO Joseph R. Varisco is a queer HIV+ multimedia producer and queer historian utilizing creative collaborations as a means of building community relationships and deconstructing boundaries. Since 2009 Varisco has invested in Chicago’s creative queer communities as the founder of JRV MAJESTY Productions, Creative Director of Chicago IRL, Teaching Artist with About Face Youth Theatre, and curator of monthly performance event LEX· IC·A. He is the creator of the Queer Lexicon oral history project and the ongoing series QUEER, ILL, & OKAY featuring queer artists living with chronic illness.
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J’SUN HOWARD Dance artist/writer, J'Sun Howard, is an undergraduate at the School of the Art Institute Chicago and Movement Director for Literary Guild Complex's Poetry Incubator Series. His choreography has appeared in multiple venues around Chicago including Links Hall, Northwestern University, Sonotheque, Lincoln Square Theatre, Insight Arts Center for New Possibilities, Rumble Arts, IN>Time Performance Art Festival, Epiphany Church, and the Chicago Academy School for the Arts. J'Sun has performed for many choreographers such as Asimina Chremos, Sara Wookey, and Selene Carter but most extensively with Darrell Jones. His literary work can be seen in Chicago IRL, Danspace Project's Constellations and Influences, the Garland Court Review, Inkwell, and Storyglossia. “Longing in the Interstice before Dying” may or may not be an elegy. I’ve been searching for ways to cope with my father passing away earlier this year. The process has been infested with these small terrors that permeate in ways that make everything pointless. The right words haven’t shown up when I’ve needed them to do so. What recurs from that evening is my mom calling, me wandering in a winter storm knowing I’m unable to do anything, and my mom calling again…I’ve been ambivalent with how I should approach this and have been only interested in the moment of abeyance, the waiting. When I first thought how one is never satisfied, I immediately wanted to explore that short time frame between those two phone calls. I don’t remember crying; I don’t remember switching into panic mode because I didn’t know how I was going to get home to Chattanooga, Tennessee; I remember feeling a mountain
weigh me down in sadness because I didn’t have the last moment of goodbye (like my brother and sister) nor any other memories to cherish now that my father is gone. I’m not satisfied with being discomforted by being in mourning. I desire it to be something else, something more like a trigger to improve the rest of this existence. Yes, I can initiate that myself but I don’t think death should be the impetus. “Longing in the Interstice before Dying” is modeled after Carmen Giménez Simth’s “Phantoms in the Pantry” because I thought it captured and fit what I felt on that January night—phantasmagoric repetitions of loneliness, heartbreak, consternation, relief, guilt, inquiry to God, shame, the inability to speak, but all the while discerning I wasn’t the one longing for something. My father was longing for closure, peace. But I’m still not satisfied that I can’t express this grief.
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JT BRUNS JT Bruns is a queer artist living in Milwaukee, WI. His work ranges in media and stems from a desire to feel connected to people around him, and to investigate the relationships in and around his life. In particular, his instructs in the relationship between absence and desire form each work. Both are inevitable aspects of the human experience whose artifacts and byproducts often become the raw materials of his practice. The majority of the materials are found; they have been gathered from various sources, in situations where they are deemed unusable or unwanted. “Paddles 1” is an ongoing series of wooden paddles inspired by traditional fraternity pledge paddles, that also reference more contemporary and lurid BDSM props. As objects that signify both power and violence, they are a look into collective and personal sexual experiences. “Paddles 1” is grouping that deals with racism in pornography and irresponsible appropriation within BDSM culture. The top left paddle is a portrait of Marquis de Sade burned onto the surface, who’s 17 century erotic writings demanded
a new definition- sadism. To it’s right is a text piece that cornerstones the collection and questions how non-white bodies are represented in pornography- specifically the gay pornography I consume. The bottom paddle in the middle says “FAG” in faux-greek text, a throw-back to the original context of the paddle as a patriarchal object. The flanking paddles are constructed of mirrors adhered to the paddle, implicating the viewer, and myself, within the context of the project.
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KARINA CLAUDIO-BETANCOURT Karina Claudio-Betancourt is a Boricua artivist, embelequera y buscabulla, with a BA in Humanities—Theatre and Creative Writing (UPR-RP) and an MA in Performance Studies (NYU). Born and raised in Puerto Rico, she now lives in Brooklyn and works as a Lead Organizer with Make the Road NY with the LGBTQ Justice Project and the Long Island Organizing Project. She received a scholarship from the Hispanic Arts Foundation in 2007, a “Performance Studies” Award in 2008, was a Hemispheric Institute EMERGENYC Fellow in 2009 and since joining Make the Road NY in 2008 she has received the Brooklyn Lambda Award (May, 2009), a City Council Proclamation (June, 2009), a Proclamation from the Queens Borough President (2010), and a City Council Proclamation (2011) for her work with the organization’s LGBTQ Justice Project. Karina has published her written and performative work in "Cuentos de Oficio" (Editorial Terranova, 2005), the online blog derivas.net, and in various anthologies such as "El Vértigo de los Aires (Poesía Latinoamericana 1974-1985)" in México (2009) and “El Tejedor en… Nueva York: Antologia de Poetas Latinoamericanos en Nueva York” (Editorial LUPI, 2011). In 2010 she published her first full length poetry book "Monógama en Serie" with the publishing house Atarraya Cartonera in Puerto Rico. My current practice is an investigation into how we queer bodies: that is, the ways we reflexively define Self and the Other. I am particularly interested in challenging our framing of biological sex, sexual identity, and gender expression as presumed binary systems. Such polarization vilifies ambiguity and represses our natural curiosity for the body. Aesthetically, my work teases our corporeality by employing an array of pigments and surfaces, materials chosen for their tactility. Through the process of layering, material encapsulates meaning and preserves memory. Revealing and concealing color parallels the varied presence of our gendered
bodies—at times vestigial, barely peeking through, while blaringly loud at others. The uncanny familiarity of ambiguous forms and textures may delight or disgust, but the pull of suggestion often takes a more powerful hold on the viewer than an outright answer. Though rarely explicit, the works invite response to psychosocial body constructs. How do we reconcile our most intimate material selves with the pressure to situate our bodies in the framework of social acceptance? Ever present in my work is the aim to freely and playfully examine the abstract intersections of personal biology and social identity, honoring our quirks and colorful contradictions.
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k.r. huppert k.r. huppert was born during a mid-April blizzard in Vermont. They have since acquired a B.A. in queer & political theory and studio art from Hampshire College, and are now searching for bigger and queerer things in Chicago. You can see more of their work at http://krhuppert.com/ This excerpt stems from a project concerning utopia, more specifically my attempt to explore the intersections between our distinctly queer ways of relating to one another in a world that constantly seeks to erase and destroy us, and the utopian realm. I wanted to reconceptualize “utopia” not as a static nor permanent place that we might reach through various means, but rather as a mode of intentional relationality that starkly differs from the normative order. The ephemeral instance(s) that bring us out of the oppressive day-to-day where we meet one another exactly as we are, with all our ghosts
and specific histories of trauma, in order to collectively recognize the intrinsic value of our interdependence. We require one another to survive, to help bear the weight of violence and oppression, to appear as multifaceted beings, and thus to act either individual or collectively in society. It is a utopia born from the divergence of desires, where what has been haunting and impeding us can finally converse. A continual process of constantly re-examining the ways in which we relate to one another in a world that that conditions us to leave each other behind. We cannot go in search of “utopia” alone.
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MATT MORRIS Matt Morris is an artist and writer who uses photography, installation and other interventions into space to articulate the cultural positionality of the queer political subject within imbricated systems of control. Through tropes of both subtlety and excess, Morris renders visible the complex erotics that underlie social landscapes. He has presented work in Chicago, IL; Memphis TN; Reims, France; Cincinnati, OH, San Antonio, TX; and Baton Rouge, LA. His writing has appeared in regional and international publications including Artforum.com, Art Papers, Sculpture, Newcity, City Beat (Cincinnati, OH), Alice Blue Review, and Aeqai, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues and artist monographs. He is a transplant from southern Louisiana who currently lives and works in Chicago. He holds a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and earned an MFA in Art Theory + Practice from Northwestern University pale grey water green woolves, 2013 watercolor + gouache on paper My persistence in reading the works of Virginia Woolf this year has been matched only by her own repeated use of a palette wherein shades of grey green, water green, blue green, pale grey water blue green are
assigned to the liminal, spacious, feminine, interior, recollected, and queer descriptions within her texts. Paintings scaled to the paperback editions I have read, numbered to correspond to Woolf’s uses of this range of color. These are voracious pursuits, discontented with anything but more of these shimmering, wet shades of grey green.
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NAQEEB STEVENS Naqeeb Stevens utilizes video, photography, and performance to investigate race, class, gender, and sexuality. He earned a BFA from Rutgers University in 2010 and MFA from University of Iowa in 2013. Variable: Posture This work plays with the performance of gender. Utilizing both the concept and the act of ‘posturing,’ in this piece I contemplate the ways bodies are understood visually. Intentionally out of focus and situated in a grid, the formal decisions of the work illustrates the role of ambiguity in perceptions of gender.
The figure enters each frame simultaneously, assumes a different pose, freezes for a brief moment, and then exits. The brevity of this video suggests how ideas like gender are quickly ingested and are partially legible. Displaying the work on a loop impacts the viewer through the effect of a recurring image, emphasizing the relationship between form and process.
Variable: Posture is available for viewing through the online version of Issue# 4: Never Satisfied
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OLI RODRIGUEZ Oli Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist working in photography, video and performance. His projects conceptually intersect and dialogue within queerness, childhood sexual politics, consent, gender deconstruction and sexuality. Rodriguez has screened, performed, lectured and exhibited internationally and nationally. Currently, he is Adjunct Assistant Professor teaching in the Photography and Film, Video, New Media Departments at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The Markings Project is a palimpsest of contortions within portraits and sexual landscapes. These photographs and video installation are markings of routine and ritual, moving through sexualized mundane arrangements. They are actions with razors,
plastic wrap and breath play, reveling in urine and beer. These are conceptions of contemporary fetishism exploring the relationship between consumption and pleasure while investigating the visual manifestations of sadomasochistic culture.
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SARP KEREM YAVUZ Born in Paris in 1991, Sarp was raised in Istanbul. His photographs most often deal with conflicting notions and codes of masculinity, offering eroticised and romanticised portraits of men. Having graduated from Oberlin College with Honors in Studio Art, he has received the Leah Freed Memorial Prize from the Oberlin College Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies Institute for his thesis exhibition, They Used to Call Me a Fag. In 2013,he was invited to display his instant film series, Substitutes for My Father in the Istanbul Modern Museum. At the age of 22, he is the youngest artist to exhibit in the museum and to be included in the permanent collection. He has exhibited in the CDA Projects Gallery and the ENKA Dr. Clinton Vickers Gallery in Istanbul, as well as the Cleveland Gordon Square Arts District in Ohio, and the Howard Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska. Since 2010, he has been working for Contemporary Istanbul, the largest contemporary art fair in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, as part of the fair's special projects division and as Social Media Coordinator. He is currently attending the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Born into a secular, liberal Turkish family and raised in Istanbul, where the East and the West meet, my experience of traditional codes of masculinity has always been skewed. Growing up in Turkey, I had often been told that I needed to “be a man,” which implied a wide spectrum of responsibilities ranging from sporting a beard to having a wife and kids. Becoming a man meant drinking raki, an alcoholic beverage made from anise, and drinking it well. It meant letting the women clear the table, and watching soccer, swearing occasionally. It meant sounding assertive, and not letting my voice rise when I got excited. I thought perhaps reconstructing masculinity would offer insight: If I could dismantle it, build it, manipulate it, then maybe I could figure out how to be a man. The very act of recreating the imagery I grew
up with would be cathartic, because in time it would demystify masculinity. I would construct the fantasy, thus ensuring that it is, after all, fantasy, and needs not hang over anyone’s head. Since 2010, I have been working on several series of photographs, all attempting to gain a better understanding of masculinity. I am inspired by contemporary artists such as Nan Goldin and Taner Ceylan, as well as David and Caravaggio. My engagement with my models as well as the images that come out of my interactions contribute to the dialogue I wish to incite, particularly in the Middle East, about what it means to be a man; about internalized patriarchy and how we can begin to deconstruct it. I wish to inspire people to reconsider themselves.
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SEAN ESTELLE Sean Estelle is a recent college graduate from UC San Diego, with a B.A. in Theatre and a minor in Visual Arts (Studio). Since graduating, he has trained with La Pocha Nostra in Athens, Greece, and performed at the San Diego Fringe Festival, the La Jolla Playhouse's Without Walls Festival, and Highways Performance Space. He works primarily in installation, sculpture, public performance, and various avenues in theatre-making. Although he currently lives in San Diego, he hopes to move to Chicago next spring and begin infiltrating the queer arts community. His work is available for viewing at cargocollective.com/seanestelle In the last month and a half, since being outed to my parents, I have had a flood of emotions run through my body again and again. I've never been much of a writer (in fact, this is one of my first published writing pieces); however, I've always had a desire to be able to articulate myself in textbased mediums, rather than just speaking and creating images around the words of
others. I've been devouring the work of David Wojnarowicz lately, both written and visual. He had the ability to transmit his raw, unfiltered emotional experiences through his pen and his brush into his art. This piece, and the writing in my journal, and the work I've been thinking about creating, has been an attempt to do the same.
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STEVIE HANLEY Stevie Hanley was born in Sacramento, CA in 1983. Holding to the hem of his mother's garment he grew up in various different religions and cities. Hanley lived for six years in Berlin after graduating with a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from U.C. Berkeley in 2006. He worked for two years as an assistant curator at the Schwules Museum (The Gay Museum) and while in Berlin exhibited at The Center for Endless Progress, Kunstraum Bethanien, September Gallery, Gallery Studio St. St. (the world's only transvestite gallery), and the Lucas Carrei Gallery. Stevie Hanley has also exhibited in New York, Istanbul and Tel Aviv and numerous unorthodox locale such as public restrooms, hotel rooms and a church slated for demolition. My work aims at exploring shame's participation with power. More specifically, it aims to harness within the experience of shame an energy of revolt, one that might reclaim spaces imbued with a sense of violation or misuse as sites for new forms of veneration. Shame entails the power inherent in recognition -- of the self and of the other. In Being and Nothingness Jean Paul Sartre posits shame as foundational for the recognition of oneself as human: "to know one's self by the other looking at one‌ Like a page from a book that realizes it is being read but cannot
read its self." The experience of shame is intimately bound up with coming to terms with one's own being human -- with being an organic, sometimes monstrous mass of functions and desires that become objects for the gaze of the other. It is for this reason that Douglas Crimp, in Mario Montez, For Shame, states that shame has the possibility of functioning as a "nexus of production." Harnessing the power of shame, my work delineates a space both sacred and profane, creating a sense of sacrilege.
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theory f. practice theory f. practice is a digital artist whose work explores the ways in which our experience of vision is controlled by social forces, with a particular focus on visual defiance. As their name suggests, theory was first compelled to produce art after coming into contact with the more philosophical and political aspects of visual culture, particularly the works of black and queer media theorists. Much of their work lies in the space between communicating complex concepts in territories beyond speech and writing. Beginning with digital collage, theory’s practice has grown to include illustration, internet art, performance, and interactive digital environments. With degrees in Studio Art and Media Studies from Pomona College, theory now lives in their native New York City making art and freelancing in graphic and web design. You can find more of their work at tfpractice.tumblr.com Whose the Fairest of Them All (2013) is a series of photocompositions interrogating the relationship between desire, knowledge, and exhaustion. Inspired by the writings of Dwight A. McBride (“Why I Hate
Abercrombie & Fitch”) and particularly christian understandings of “original sin,” Who’s the Fairest wrestles with the problem of knowing too much to ignore a problem, and too little to fix it.
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ZACH SAYERS Zach Sayers is an up-and-coming artist who resides in Chicago’s Rogers Park area. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received his BFA in painting and photography in 2013. Zach will be pursuing his MFA in the near future. “It is my ultimate goal to share with the world the social, economic, personal and cultural effects of art and science. To be aware and to understand the implications of science and to explore those possibilities in art, provide the viewer not only with pleasing images but the awareness necessary to understand the ever changing environment around us”. These works examine my life with a diabetic body. Craving for me appears in many forms, be it: sex, food, affection, recognition, normalcy and independence. I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 11, then discovered that I was gay a few years later. Being diabetic has presented itself with not only physical limitations but emotional ones as well; this being the root of "craving". Untitled (Figure with Syringe Wrappers) as well as Untitled (Configuration with Glucose
test strips) presents a certain dichotomy rooted in longing. "How can I attract a man with my body - do I decorate it to mask the disease within"? "The attention needed to maintain, only increases the craving of normalcy". The struggle is only completed (I have found) when genuine honesty makes an appearance. These paintings are honesty in the flesh. Honesty in facing reality and accepting the truth that I am "never satisfied”.
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W W W. 3 R D L A N G U A G E . C O M