GET LOST 01.27.17 - 03.04.17
GET LOST SIMÓN GARCÍA-MIÑAÚR | SFAI IZIDORA LEBER | SFAI RICHARD-JONATHAN NELSON | CCA COURTNEY TROUBLE | CCA
Inspired by philosopher Herbert Marcuse's notion of "the great refusal," Embark’s latest exhibition showcases contemporary takes on queer identity politics. By challenging the representational imagery that queer art is perhaps best known for, these artists present a new understanding of the self through displacement and absence, suggesting that queer activism in the digital age may take more nuanced forms of expression. The video work of Simón Garcia-Miñaur (SFAI) features the inaccessible body, mystifying the shared sexual experience. His queer narratives explore the fringe; mobilizing cyborg figures to destabilize socially constructed binaries. Courtney Trouble (CCA) also uses techniques of erasure politically, literally grinding up photographs of queer bodies and spaces into dust. Through this transformation of subject to object to abstraction, she takes the medium of photography which is so essential to the history of queer art, and makes it fragile, fleeting and thoroughly unrecognizable. Her “glitched” landscape photographs are a product of adding hidden messages to the images’ digital code.
Installation photograph.
Courtney Trouble and Izidora Leber, installation.
Izidora Leber (SFAI) presents a textual piece in several forms: spoken word, video and installation. The work, titled A rumination of the queer body in documentary and video making history-and suggestions of how to get lost as a concept for identitarian escape is informed by hybridity and aims to disrupt categorizations of identity. Her installation of hand dyed orange balaclavas speak to resistance and reference the seriality of masculine modern sculpture, which is then queered through their DIY aesthetic and politcal connotation. Richard-Jonathan Nelson (CCA) presents vibrantly colored digital collages and soft sculptures that refuse heteronormative ideals and present a multifaceted and nuanced perspective on queer masculinity, the gaze, and racial power structures in the queer community. This exhibition was juried by Avram Finkelstein, a founding member of the collective responsible for the Silence=Death poster, and of the art collective Gran Fury. Angelica Jardini Curatorial Director
SIMÓN GARCÍA-MIÑAÚR | SFAI “An Unexpected Visit is a comically melodramatic story about a chance encounter with a past lover. Told through two channels installed as a diptych (one showing the protagonist, and the other showing his point of view) the nameless protagonist wears a full-body, green-screen suit, the past lover is a haphazardly computer-generated avatar with no emotion, and the voice-over narration is a melancholic robot voice with a stiffness that satirizes the histrionic text. The visible chroma key character embodies the invisible, it is what is not supposed to be seen; but its emotional insight is universal. The contrast between the physical green screen character and the computer-generated being stresses the contrived nature of digital depictions and the odd ways in which computers allow us to manufacture a self outside of our physical being.”
Simon Garcia-Minaur. An Unexpected Visit, 2015, HD video, 2-channel video installation. 04:49 min.
Simon Garcia-Minaur. Welcome to Introduction to Fractal Sex, 2015. HD video, single channel. Installed with Richard-Jonathan Nelson’s Wall Fabric 1, 2016. Digital print.
Simon Garcia-Minaur. Welcome to Introduction to Fractal Sex, 2015. HD video, single channel. Screenshot.
IZIDORA LEBER | SFAI “What is visibility? How has it been approached? What is a feminist gaze? What is a queer gaze? When the human figure is put into representation, it becomes allegorical, it becomes iconic. The question is, how can representation be tackled in a way that acknowledges the struggles of second wave feminist urge for visibility and genderqueer and transgender destabilization of exactly that aim? although this turn to the identitarian in that time was important and even historically necessary, it is equally important to reject on what was lost by this particular process of formalization. How can we, in cultural production, reject and destabilize the traditional notion of selfhood, like “I am a thing. I arrive at it at whatever age, and that’s the thing I am forever.”? What representations of genders are even possible and how do genders becomes visible to each other but also within oneself? And the same thing can be asked about cultural identities: What cultural visibility is even possible and how do people having those hybrid identities become visible to each other but also to one selves? Theres the suggestion of abstraction as a solution. But I wonder about the right to representation. The whole process of documentary making is about representation, and that an artist or person could make claim to representing themselves. - It’s really about individuals and the communities that they represent, and all too often, unfortunately, we don’t hear about individual people until it’s too late. There needs to be more complicated ways that we can center to people’s needs of a representation that is complex, fluid, escaping, fleeting. Everybody transitioned. You went through puberty, you became a woman or a man, you moved from home, you fell in love and broke up, you are getting older and you are dying: your body is in a constant state of transition and there are some people who embody that very human mode of transitionality in a sort of crystalized way or an accelerated way, - and that often is queer and trans* people, people in immigration or state of acute deviance otherwise.
For me, one of the ways of trying to maneuver around this historical problem of imaging the transitional body is to think about having a body or being a body without necessarily showing a body. And Like, how can my body speak in a language that doesn’t exist yet? “I am many, “I am many, “I am actually many.” To bring it back to its mediality: how can moving image facilitate a localization of current history in order to subvertthe normative and have a generative effect without being relentlessly held hostage -via representation!in its own history of anthropology? The crisis of representation has been driving narratives of the last decades. I have been digging for years to find simple solutions of how to de-imperialize and emancipate the gaze of the lens.I’ve used Strategies such as intimacy, positioning, abstraction, subjectification - and they seem insufficiently to be breaking with the epistemic reinforcement of engraved uni-directionality. While holding this reading, I am hoping to shake the ghosts in a direction of futurity, that “we might be able to feel as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality,” to say it in Muñoz’s words. We have to be invisible, tangeable, mallable. We know what the confines are and we have to run with the still. We need to capture the moment that introduces a past that can be subverted towards a future that is outside. In part, we need to narrate a stage of in-between ness, a specialty that is aligned with a temporality that is on the threshold between identifications, lifeworlds and potentialities. the solution to the problem of identity is to get lost.”
Izidora Leber. A rumination of the queer body in documentary and video making history - and suggestions of how to get lost as a concept for identitarian escape. 2016.
Izidora Leber. Get Lost, 2017. Dyed fabric balaclavas.
Izidora Leber. Still from They (outside), 2016. Digitized 16mm film.
RICHARD JONATHAN-NELSON | CCA
“My work is based in the vibrant refusal of assumed roles of black queer bodies, of exalted heteronormative ideals of masculine behavior, and of inferred power dynamics between queer and heterosexual men. The large wall pieces of black male bodies submerged in pseudo-purgatory realms of pleasure and pain question who decides how men of color can inhabit the queer world. Why do ethnic bodies become sites of both pleasure and enforced pain the moment they enter gay spaces? The quilted soft sculptures are physical refusals of acceptable definitions of queer masculinity based in plaid garbed bearded bodies. Queer masculinity can be brash, colorful, and multifaceted in clashing dimensions of expression.�
Richard Jonathan-Nelson. Quilt 2, 2016.
Richard Jonathan-Nelson. Quilt 1, 2016.
Richard-Jonathan Nelson. Embroidery 2, 2017. Digital print, thread. Richard-Jonathan Nelson. Embroidery 1, 2017. Digital print, thread.
COURTNEY TROUBLE | CCA “As “Courtney Trouble,” I have been troubling/queering the porn industry by refusing its formula and creating my own world, a queer porn underground, for over a decade. In my MFA program, I am working to trouble my own imagery and confront it’s own place in The Spectacle. Where once I would focus on environmental erotic portraits that “say something” about the individual and frame an iconography, in the language of pin up, Mapplethorpe, and Opie - I now look to a general practice of saying “no” by challenging that archive to be more than it was, and challenging myself to be more than I “am.” One project that has come from my own interests in critiquing my own work through new work, is taking my photos and grinding them down to the pigments that get set on the paper in the digital studio. I call them dust pieces, and they lay precariously on surfaces unfixed, as to show the transformation from subject to object, and from object to abstract, and to take a photograph (so popularly described as “freezing desire”) and make it something that, like desire/love/relationships/friendships/life, can disappear with a nudge or a breath.
I’ve diverted into more ideas of queer space, by “queering” simple landscapes and natural forms found in my photography archives. My compulsive photographer’s trigger finger is found on the shore and near the sky, and I’ve turned to those images and embedded them with new code queer poetry, mix tapes, the lyrics to “bad blood”- in a process called glitching. The results are non-determined and while beautiful in many ways, are mere byproducts of the glitch. This is why my favorite question right now is, “What is the difference between queer porn and a pink sky?”
Courtney Trouble. Pink skies, 2016. Archival pigment print.
Courtney Trouble. Pink skies, 2016. Archival pigment print. Courtney Trouble. CMYK, 2017. Photoprint pigment, glitter. Installation view.
Courtney Trouble. There is a light that never goes out (Rio), 2017. Digital banner print.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Lauren Dare Avram Finkelstein Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture Marcel Houtzager Matt Lopez Sartle.com Brooke Valentine Thor, Zeus & Jasper
Embark Gallery offers exhibition opportunities to graduate students of the Fine Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area. We provide a space for an engaged community of artists, curators and scholars, and we aim to expand the audience for up and coming contemporary art. A non-profit gallery, Embark’s programming represents the diversity of the talented artists studying at eight local art institutions: San Francisco Art Institute, UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, Mills College, San Francisco State University, UC Davis, San Jose State University, and Stanford. The juried exhibitions are held at our gallery in San Francisco at the historic Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture.
Tania Houtzager | Executive Director Nicole Aponte | Education Director Angelica Jardini | Curatorial Director Christopher Squier | Programs Director
embarkgallery.com | 2 Marina Blvd | Bldg B, Ste 330 | San Francisco | 94123