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Don’t Joke About That Life is crazy.
So much so, that you can go crazy trying to figure out the meaning of it all. However, sometimes we forget to not take it all so seriously. Philosopher Albert Camus infamously said there is only one true way to get through the absurdity: to accept the absurd. According to entertainment mogul RuPaul Charles, once you realize that this thing we call ‘life’ isn’t that serious, “that’s when life begins.” For centuries, from Camus to Charles, philosophers and artists alike have been exploring the absurd nature of life. Don’t Joke About That is an exhibition featuring works of art that portray absurdism, humor, camp, and neo-dadaism in modern art and self-portraiture. Drawing its name from a quote by drag queen Sasha Velour, this collection will showcase artworks that make light of the serious and work to bring whimsy and artistic expression back to the modern art landscape. These works span photography, performance, painting, fiber art, and collage from artists that make culturally referential art with levity and innovative approaches. Addressing tough topics like self-esteem, narcissism, image, and identity performance, these works highlight the comedy that exists within the human experience. The artworks within this exhibition all tackle the ridiculous aspects of life. From the ironic, mundane, day-to-day actions that are subverted by Lindsey Whittle and Lia Cavalaris, to the fine art abstraction of identity performance by Monsieur Zohore, Bianca Fields, Gina Osterloh, and Chris Noon, to the creation of hysterical caricatures of themselves by Delaney McQuown, Ian Langohr, and Parker Day, to even the more earnest depictions with campy and absurdist qualities by Brandon Thompson and Darion Hassertt; this exhibition features works created by artists that highlight the humor in their own life experience and/or marginalization.
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The Playlist As one of the five senses, Sound is an integral aspect to the human experience. To be played in tandem with viewing this exhibition, a 10-track playlist of music referential to the show's concept was curated. The songs chosen are made by marginalized musicians that discuss their identity performance with levity and genuine emotions. Scan the spotify code below to listen on Spotify.
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Lia Cavalaris is a 23 y/o artist based in Cincinnati, OH. She works primarily in 2-D, Digital, and sound based media.
en plein air, 2020 performance piece 4 minutes, 10 seconds
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Artist Says: “What I am really trying to do is revolutionize painting by combining action painting and en plein air painting to form a totally unique experience packaged in the most exciting form of entertainment– extreme sports. I am an artist critic’s dream. Please don’t make me talk about myself.” Lia Says: “At this point can’t we all just admit we are artists? Acts of artmaking include, and are not limited to dancing, loving, (having a) conversation, shitting, running, blinking, napping, cooking, smiling, and frowning. There is no creation or destruction, only transformation. Why are we still listening to the words of dead fucks who attempted to standardized acts of artmaking?” Lia the Artist: “Constantly feeling a desire to revolutionize my self through art making, I found frustration with the institution of art and the restraints placed upon artists. This idea came about when I was sitting on my couch looking at the hill outside of my apartment window and I thought, I have this old canvas I stretched in my closet what if I rode it down that hill– that would be fucking funny wouldn’t it? That ‘d also be an authentic en plain air painting. But an action painting also? But also full of shit and totally inaccessible because what importance and relevance does this really serve beyond the community of artists to whom these terms are relevant? It is a display of an internal struggle, a critique, humility, and humor. A response to how I have felt as a painter, constantly questioning the relevancy the act of painting and display of a painting has.”
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Roachelle, 2020 Digital photograph
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Parker Day is a portrait photographer based in Los Angeles, California, whose work deals with the expression and perception of identity. Curator’s Note: Parker Day has an eclectic, eccentric, and diverse portfolio full of campy, colorful fine art portraiture meant to demand your attention. Day’s work heavily features the creation of kooky and slightly jarring characters. These personas come to life with trendy costuming and transformative hair, makeup, and prosthesis. “Roachelle” is no exception. In this portrait, Day does something that is not commonly seen in her work: she transforms herself.
“Roachelle”, a character Day has monikered as “the cootie queen”, shows the artist transformed in a bubblegum pink satin gown with matching pearl white gloves, tarnished with unidentifiable stains. With her hair in a French style bouffant and shambolic campy make-up, Day is, as her character’s name might suggest, adorned with roaches. This character’s subversive attempt to be high class and royalty, while being dressed in insects, is successfully finished off with Day’s portrayal. She is coy, yet commanding, even flirting with the camera as her dress strap is fallen and the lace of her bra is visible. This playful, humorous portrait is absurd in nature, but also creates conversation about identity performance, providing a subversive image of wealth and beauty as it may appear in the media and in art. Day is has completely altered her image, including colored contacts, a drawn-on unibrow, and the creation of a lipstick-covered gap in her teeth, all while flaunting her tattooed arms. This balance of Parker Day and Roachelle shows her ability to transform and embody any persona her mind imagines, while highlighting the fluidity of identity.
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tongue and cheek, 2019 Acrylic on yupo paper 14 x 11 inches
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Bianca Fields is a contemporary painter from Cleveland, OH, currently living and based in Kansas City, MO. Fields’ work introduces a manifestation of her perceived imagination and material sensibilities within the paint itself. She often pulls her source of imagination from the expression of the childhood cartoon world, seeking to create visual noise and tension within her paintings. Her work has been exhibited at ruttkowski68 in Paris, France, as well as Bellevue Arts Museum in Seattle, WA. “These paintings are my guttural response to Pop culture phenomena; most often these phenomena are represented by iconic figures from television shows and children’s books from the 80s and 90s. The work is agitatedly painted, with thick, bodily brush strokes. Mining popular culture, the reference images I use may be silly, familiar or cliché. My paintings distort and beautify these images, using luscious, drippy and grotesque mark making; provoking a visceral response. These iconic forms are removed from their ordinarily ideal scenery and given new potential in a foreign landscape of real life emotion and pain. Frozen in their final pose, the subjects receive an applause in the spotlight in the center of the frame. The multi-layered surface provokes a desire to indulge in, touch, and digest the work. This provocation places a hand into the puppet of my imagination; immersing the viewer into a space that reinforces the tension between the brutality of adult society through the idealistic concepts presented to children.”
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“The tapestries of gender expression and the personal archive (family photo album, Facebook memories, etc.) are complex phenomena that have been constructed by (or as an aversion to) (or completely indiscriminate of) the mythology forced upon us by patriarchy and heteronormativity. Our personal means of expression are dictated by the undulating cavities sunken into the culture within capitalism. The arbitrary variable of the image in this social structure is a space that can be filled with the comedy of absurdity, with our own language of silliness. We can speak a tongue of goofiness within the already random settings we are pre-assigned for our lives. An epitaxy is an act of recrystallization. It is where air becomes gold, vapor becomes jewel. I see my own gender expression as a sort of epitaxy, and I see this societally, as well. My agency, ethereal, takes an act of flux and becomes solid, in and out of privacy and publicity. I express myself in a personal library of costume and reference, however I see fit. Some days, I am Cher from Clueless that has been Harley Quinned into a bath of noxious purple goop and emerges in neon orange lingerie, and others, I am serving sweaty masc ketchup bottle on a date with a jar of strawberry preserves. I am a still life for myself- my personal language of gender is my faux-luxurious architectural design for the clearance rack of existence- I embrace the absurdity of a chaotic universe and reject the arbitrary assignment of standards for gender expression defined by capitalism in the daily ritual of dressing myself as a genderless, ethereal mannequin, finding epitaxy as any number of characters I invent in my own image, beyond any rational precedent within our absurd cultural rigidity around gender. The culture we live in works hard to be as impersonal as possible. Biography is a residue, we are taught. Output has become the only item of significance in the funerary monument of the author. In this, little significance has been considered for the personal narrative and personal archive within the story at large of our society. We are expected to work as machines of culture, an apparatus for service and labor. The personal archive is a rejection of this and yet also implicated by this. Often, the photographs you find in the family photo album are littered with the work of a commercial photo studio. Many families, especially pre-iPhone camera, would visit a Walmart or Sears photo center to walk away with an icon of their family that fit distinctly within the aesthetics of every other mass-produced image of this kind. The conventions are all the same- flattening studio lighting, an abstract blue or mauve fabric backdrop, footballs for boys, princesses for girls, etc. This object of the archive becomes as much of an emblem of capitalism as any other mass-produced object you could purchase within the store, and yet paradoxically, it is also a rejection of capitalism. This image becomes part of an archive within the greater context of one’s life, and is standard bearer of self identity, biography, and love. What happens when the arbitrary variables of the family picture are dismembered? What happens when they are abstracted out of their own absurdity, to the point where the family picture is no longer a picture of a family at all, but semiotically still speaks the language of Walmart?�
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Darion Hassertt is an artist who lives and works in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is a student at the University of Cincinnati studying Fine Art and Art History. Hassertt’s practice is often centered around his experiences as a queer person and the personal narratives that exist around contemporary queerness, as well as the place of textiles, archive, and community in a Post-Digital world. He practices a range of visual media and methodological approaches to research.
Epitaxy (Self Portrait), 2019 Digital Photograph
Picture Day (Deluxe Package), 2020 Digital Photograph
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Born in the Niagara region of Ontario, Ian graduated from the Sculpture and Installation program at OCAD in 2008. His pursuits led him to develop skills in mascot and puppet fabrication which he explores in both his personal and commissioned work today. He has lived and worked in the city of Montréal since 2009, integrating himself into a variety of creative communities that exist there.
“In both my personal and commissioned work I have explored character designs that invoke a narrative through surreal and often horrific imagery. I draw inspiration from sci-fi and horror films, peculiar aspects of nature, and character design from both pop surrealistic art and contemporary cartoons. This series of self-portraits was never planned but gradually grew over the past decade, and may continue. It started with ‘Nest’ (2009), which aimed to present a conflict of man vs nature. My hope was to present a scenario where an animal and human could be seen having a symbiotic relationship in an uncomfortable way. Ambiguity is present in whether a bird is holding a human hostage in order to incubate its eggs, or whether the human is attempting to eat the eggs and the bird is acting in defense. ‘Self-Portrait with Exit Wound’ (2015) depicts my face smiling with a bleeding hole in my forehead. The other side reveals a bubbly vortex of colour, reminiscent of bullet wounds shown on T-1000 from Terminator 2. It is meant to invoke both the pain and joy of creativity. Finally, ‘Split SelfPortrait’ (2020) shows a skeleton in the process of cracking and crawling out of my body. It acts as both a calm meditation on the inevitability of death and an ode to 80’s sci-fi/horror films; think Aliens, The Thing, Evil Dead.”
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Self-Portrait with Exit Wound (detail below), 2018 Foam and Fabric 20 x 18 x 30 inches
Nest, 2009 Foam and Fabric 20 x 16 x 30 inches
Split (Self Portrait), 2020 Foam and Fabric 20 x 30 x 32 inches
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Delaney McQuown was born in 1999 in Upper Sandusky, OH. She is working towards her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree at the University of Cincinnati, College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. McQuown currently lives and works in Cincinnati, OH. Her practice primarily uses photography, drawing, and poetry to make sense of individual identity.
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Boss Bitch, 2019 Archival inkjet print, grid paper, embossing foil, acrylic, wood panel 48.5 x 38 inches
“This work was part of a series dealing with the body and changes to it overtime, specifically my personal struggle with weight gain. The series consisted of lots of self-portraits and work balancing vulnerability and confidence. Boss Bitch was a favorite in the series because it was a piece about loving yourself, embracing the changes, being confident in yourself, and just being a bad ass. It was about owning my vulnerability. This body of work is most successful when these two works are displayed together. They balance each other out and represent the highs and lows of becoming confident in your own skin. The moment in ‘Putting it out on the Table’ had to happen in order for ‘Boss Bitch’ to occur. One, a moment of bold confidence and the other a moment of complete insecurity. The highs and the lows.”
Putting it out on the Table, 2019 Archival inkjet prints, cellophane, acrylic paint, wood panel 24 x 39 inches
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Christopher Quon Noon is a photographer specializing in a more fine art field. Originally from Placentia, California, Noon is currently based in Los Angeles. His style is visually striking erotic photographs that aims to convey an array of emotions. All photography is shot on film, giving the works a more raw aesthetic.
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Red01, 2018 film photography
Untitled Self Portrait, 2017 film photography
“My passion for photography first ignited during my junior year of high school when I met one of my most inspiring teachers, Mrs. Jillian Jacobson. Because of her insightful encouragement, I learned to push myself conceptually and to challenge the everyday norms and comfort levels about what can and cannot be art. Tragedy struck when Mrs. Jacobson committed suicide; she was found hanging in the photography classroom. This horrific incident has inspired my work to be emotional and vulnerable. I utilize surrealism and melancholic eroticism to create visual unease with the intimate subject matter we know as the human figure. Social isolation, emotional torment, and sexual frustration remain prominent recurring themes that I explore in my work. I aspire to showcase misery through absurdity. Photography is unflinchingly raw. Consequently, I find the grainy imperfections of the analog film process and darkroom printing to be particularly effective in creating a grim atmosphere.�
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Blank Athleticism #3, 2007 Digital Photograph; lightjet digital c-print 40 x 50 inches
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Gina Osterloh’s photography and conceptual art takes the form of printed photographs, film, video, sculptural forms, and performance. Her work often depicts mark-making and her own body traversing, tracing, and puncturing photographic space in a quest to interrogate preconceived notions of identity, and the formation of self and Other. Through the desire to create her own space and new contexts for being, Osterloh’s photographs depict meticulously constructed large scale photo tableaux environments as well as drawing on photo backdrop paper, that expand our understanding of portraiture and what photography can be. Symbolic themes and formal elements such as the void, orifice, the shadow and the grid, in addition to a heightened awareness of color, repetitive pattern and actions, appear throughout Osterloh’s work. Her photographs often activate the contours between pleasure, desire, and repulsion – intertwined and inextricable through the act of looking. Gina Osterloh cites her experience growing up mixed-race Filipino American in Ohio as a set of formative experiences that led her to photography and larger questions of how a viewer perceives difference.
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Brandon Thompson is a fine artist living and working in Dallas, TX. He earned his Bachelor of Art in Graphic Design from the University of Texas in Arlington. Thompson’s work showcases his experiences growing up in the suburb of Cedar Hill from a non-autobiographical point. He creates cartoonish narratives based on nostalgia, fashion, and culture, with some emphasis on internal struggles and social issues. Thompson primarily uses paint and sculptural mediums.
CAN’T LET THE DEVIL STEAL YOUR JOY, 2019 Oil, acrylic, glitter, and gemstones on canvas 64 x 54 inches
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THERE GOES MY RINGS, 2017 Oil, acrylic, glitter, and gemstones on canvas 40 x 30 inches
Curator’s Note: Brandon Thompson is making art for himself. One of the main cornerstones of dada art, the work he makes is not for the audience or for sale, it is for him; to reflect on various aspects of his culture and life, addressing his past experiences and influences though his work. This is evident in “THERE GOES MY RINGS”, and illusion to Sonic the Hedgehog and subtly to Super Mario Bros.. The figure seen in this painting is cartoon-like in its rendering, with larger than life glassy eyes skewed towards the center and graphic paint strokes. Truly faux-naive in style, this work is full of millennial camp references to the video game icon, from the Sonic Blue slides, paired perfectly with Baby Blue Polo Socks, to the instantly recognizable checkerboard setting. However, once digesting the veneer of comical and humorous elements and allusions to the game, it is clear that at the core of this piece is a not-so subtle reference to the antagonistic relationship between law enforcement and Black citizens. It’s been said that if someone in distress is telling you about their struggle, listen to them. After all, it is their struggle, not yours. This work is doing just that. Thompson is making a reference to the struggle of Black people across the country in a highly digestible, colorful, and campy artwork. Humor is a vehicle to conversation, and “THERE GOES MY RINGS” sparks a very necessary conversation.
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Curator’s Note: Lindsay Whittle is unpredictable. That’s what I love about her. If you ever have the pleasure of running into her in person, whether it be at an art opening or on a regular degular Tuesday afternoon at a coffee shop, she will catch your eye with her wild fashions and infectious personality. Before she even has a chance to, she speaks for herself. Having a rather dynamic and colorful art practice as well, Whittle has even had the opportunity to work with the Sound Suit provocative himself Nick Cave. “Extraordinary Brushing” is an early addition to the performance artist’s catalog of stellar, conceptually-driven videos. Whittle’s “Brushing” highlights left-of-center fiber art and garment design, the importance of color theory and ornamentation, along with a revolving door of quirky personas that demand our attention. All that loud is met with the quiet, mundane action of brushing your teeth—among other things. The handmade, organic nature of the video further highlights Whittle’s involvement in the process and rejection of minimalistic art practices, while also solidifying the satirical tone. When selecting pieces for this exhibition, I immediately thought of Whittle’s dynamic practice full of humorous performances and dynamic outfits. When viewing her “Extraordinary Brushing” performance, I found myself on the edge of my seat waiting for the next character, with a smile on my face. This performance is one that sticks with you for all the right reasons. A Much needed boost of Seratonin.
Extraordinary Brushing #1, 2013 performance piece 7 minutes, 51 seconds
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Lindsey Whittle is a multimedia performance/garment artist, print designer and facilitator whose primary mediums are collaboration and color. The foundation of her work is the use of her daily duration projects and wearable print language to carry conversations of her artwork experiences out of traditional art spaces and into her daily routine. Whittle is a professor/educator that has developed custom garment art and performance art programs for the Art Academy of Cincinnati since 2016. Whittle coowns and co-instigates PIQUE experience gallery and Airbnb in Covington, Ky with her husband and fellow artist Clint Basinger and Annie Brown and Noel Maghathe. She holds a painting degree from the Art Academy of Cincinnati (2007), studied fashion design at the University of Cincinnati (2012), and has a masters in Fashion Body and Garment from the School of the Art Institute Chicago (2014). Whittle was the craft editor for Kiki Magazine (2012-2015) and taught English at a fashion high school in Gifu, Japan (2009). Whittle’s work has been exhibited in Salem, MA, Chicago, IL, and Cincinnati, OH. PIQUE’s Airbnb has been featured in Architectural Digest and Whittle’s artworks by Hyperallergic.
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Monsieur Zohore is an Ivorian-American artist based in New York and Baltimore. His practice is invested in the consumption and digestion of culture through the conflation of domestic quotidian labor with art production. Through performance, sculpture, installation and theater, his practice explore queer histories alongside his Ivorian-American heritage through a multi-faceted lens of humor, economics, art history, and labor. Zohore received his BFA from the Cooper Union in 2015 and his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2020. His work has been exhibited in numerous venues including Palo Gallery (New York), Terrault Gallery (Baltimore), New Release Gallery (New York), 56 Henry (New York), Canada Gallery (New York), and Jack Barrett Gallery (New York) as well as at the 2020 Material ArtFair (Coyoacan, CMDX). Zohore has also been invited to show at The Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore), Washington Projects for the Arts (Washington D.C.), and at The Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus).
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“In MZ.11 (ComĂŠdien Ivoirien) uses his body to literally confront the comedic and political and art historical history of the banana or in this case the plantain. In this video performance shot in front of a live studio audience, a blindfolded Monsieur Zohore attempts to dodge plantains being thrown at him by the participating audience. The action is scored by the tinny drone of his reimagining of the Benny Hill theme song. By slowing down the track Zohore reveals the sinister undertones of his comedic labor. A still of this performance is currently on sale [as of November 4, 2020] through Art For Black Lives. All proceeds from the sale go towards the Okra Project, a collective offering food, support, and resources to Black Trans people worldwide.â€?
MZ.11 (Comedian Ivoirien), 2018-2020 performance piece 5 minutes, 32 seconds
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Huge thanks to Jordan Tate and Lorena Molina for creating the Elote Loco Gallery, a student-curated digital gallery space.
Curated By Alex Macon, Photographer and Designer at the University of Cincinnati