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BACK OF THE GALLERY
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FILM MAP
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Katherine E. Nash Gallery
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September 10 - December 7, 2019
PROJECTION A Pabllo Vittar, Disk Me, 2018 – 3:16 min.
Mo B. Dick (Mo Fischer), Job Interview, 2018 – 2:29 min.
Singer and drag superstar Pabllo Vittar is slowly taking over the world. The 24-year-old drag queen has become a household name in her home country of Brazil and has found mainstream recognition by collaborating with all-star names like Diplo, Charli XCX and many more. In this gorgeously shot video, Vittar goes full drag diva. While others would be content with simply donning a bejeweled outfit for a video like this, Vittar instead spends most of the video dripping in diamonds, commanding the attention of the audience not only visually, but with entrancing vocals to match. (Billboard)
Mo B. Dick is the brain child of Mo Fischer whose motto is “instead of being an angry woman, I became a funny man.” Cited as one of the founding fathers of the modern day Drag King movement, Mo B. Dick began in November 1995 in the East Village of New York City. Starting in 1996, Mo produced and hosted Club Casanova, the world’s first weekly party dedicated solely to Drag Kings. In 1998 Mo took the show on the road, touring 18 cities in United States and Canada. Tours in 2001 and 2002 followed, which created an International Drag King explosion. Mo B. Dick appeared in the John Waters film Pecker. Currently he is working with fellow Drag King Ken Vegas of Washington, D.C. to create an archive dedicated to Drag King history. (Mo Fischer)
Jordan Bahat, Girlfriend, 2018 – 3:46 min. Conceived & performed by Chris & the Queens (Héloïse Letissier), ft. Dâm-Funk.
Girlfriend tangles sex boasts with word games designed to ask what is a girl, what is a friend, what is a lover? “I wanted to make complicated narratives,” Letissier says. At their center is “this multi-faceted character of a woman who can be extremely lustful and extremely depressed, extremely powerful and extremely vulnerable. It’s not just a pose. It’s a reality for me. I mean, it’s not easy for me to understand, so why would it be easy for other people to understand? People were like, ‘Yeah, you’re gay.’ Often there is a comfort in choosing. I never felt like I could do it. Because I felt constantly surprised by desire as a force of chaos, and constantly unsure of how I could define myself. My eroticism is made of exploring. Being confused is my eroticism.” (Joe Levy, Rollingstone)
Corinne Teed, Mounting Evidence, 2014 – 9:08 min. Created with appropriated footage from traditional nature documentaries, Mounting Evidence interrupts the compulsory heterosexuality and homophobia embedded in the genre of nature documentary. The video foregrounds the robust bestiary of queer animals, while the script plays off semantic tropes of nature documentarian David Attenborough. Acting as an archival intervention, Mounting Evidence centers well-documented research on queerness in other species that has historically been suppressed and erased by the nature documentary genre. (Corinne Teed) 2
Andrea Stoops Villarrubia, Adam, 1996 – 4 min. In this tender claymation short film, a little girl is mistaken for a boy and relishes the opportunity. Illuminating the innocence of first sexual experiences and the fluidity of gender identity, Adam is a delightful reminiscence of childhood. (Frameline)
Lorelei Pepi, Happy and Gay, 2014 – 10:12 min. Happy and Gay is a revisionist history document reflecting the form of a 1930’s-styled cartoon musical. Its main focus is aimed at responding to acts of censorship, prejudice and stereotype by re-placing a positive representation of gay and lesbian characters into a positively queer narrative. This film embeds versions of sterotyped representations as a way to maintain a focus on the original truth of these. The intention is to draw attention to these stereotyped signifiers as real occurrences in the films of this era, including the stereotyped homosexual. While the film’s story is positive and entertaining, the story isn’t resolved and without its own original history. (Lorelei Pepi)
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PROJECTION B
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Frank Simon, The Queen, 1968 – 68 min.
Noah Barth, FREE You, 2019 – 22:42 min.
There’s a particularly moving moment during the conclusion of the film that plays superficially as the lament of a performer given a second-place spot, but in actuality is an incredibly aware and moving moment of aggression. The person giving this tirade is none other than Miss Crystal LaBeija whose House of LaBeija would become a main focus in the incredible documentary Paris is Burning and while the screed does feel rightly performative it also hints at real and important racial dynamics within the community. Her complaint about being passed over for a white performer even though she feels like she put in exponentially more effort is both raw in the context of a runner up feeling rejected and even more transgressive when the racial component she brings up feels unresolved even to this day. (Joshua Brunsting, Criterion Cast)
As somebody who was born, raised, and has never lived outside of the Midwest, I find it important to locate myself within a genealogy of queer activism in the Midwest - rather than some abstract citadel of New York City or San Francisco. I’ve been to those places and I can understand, appreciate, and find connections to those histories, but I’ve never lived there. To do queer work in the Midwest, to find this history, is to understand that this work wasn’t disconnected from those histories on the coasts but was rather part of a national movement of gay liberation organizing. I also think that what makes F.R.E.E. unique is that it was here, if that makes sense. Minnesota is not New York, Minnesota is not San Francisco, Minnesota is not Chicago. (Noah Barth and Rachel Mattson, Exhibiting F.R.E.E.)
Michelle Parkerson, Stormé: The Lady of the Jewel Box, 1987 – 21 min.
Tourmaline & Sasha Wortzel, Happy Birthday, Marsha!, 2018 – 14 min.
During the 1950’s and 60’s Stormé DeLarverie toured the Black theater circuit as a mistress of ceremonies and the sole male impersonator of the legendary Jewel Box Revue, America’s first integrated female impersonation show and forerunner of La Cage aux Folles. The multiracial revue was a favorite act of the Black theater circuit and attracted mixed mainstream audiences from the 1940s through the 1960s, a time marked by the violence of segregation. Parkerson finds Stormé in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, now working as a bodyguard at a women’s bar and still singing in her deep silky voice with an “all girl” band. Through archival clips from the past, Stormé looks back on the grandeur of the Jewel Box Revue and its celebration of pure entertainment in the face of homophobia and segregation. Stormé herself emerges as a remarkable woman, who came up during hard times but always “kept a touch of class.” (Women Make Movies)
Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel’s short film is a moving celebration and evocation of trans activist and artist Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson, set on the eve of the Stonewall riots in 1969. Tourmaline and Wortzel bring archival intimacies and a deep sense of care to the project of representing Johnson’s life and legacy, resulting in a remarkable film that ranges in feeling from soaring uplift to deep loss. Created through extensive community collaboration, the film features lush cinematography by Arthur Jafa, an expressive score by Geo Wyeth, and star turn performances by Mya Taylor as Johnson and by queer New York City stalwarts Jay Toole, Jimmy Camicia, and Egyptt LaBeija, among many others. (Alex Fialho, Artforum, March 20, 2018)
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PROJECTION C Steven Liang, Afuera, 2016 – 14 min.
Fan Popo & David Zheng, New Beijing, New Marriage, 2009 – 17:23 min
I made Afuera to explore the intersection between the immigrant and transgender experiences, and the resilience of this community. As a gay man of color from a working-class, immigrant family, I understand deeply the complexity of identity, and I want to explore these characters in a way that is authentic and universal. My goal is to discover and empower new transgender talent of color, as well as illuminate their specific plight. Caitlyn Jenner, Laverne Cox, and Jill Soloway were instrumental in bringing transgender narratives into the mainstream. However, the stories of undocumented transgender women are virtually invisible. Afuera helps raise awareness, while at the same time, humanizes the undocumented trans experience. (Steven Liang)
The couples in New Beijing, New Marriage appropriate the modern ritual of the wedding photograph in order to appear in everyday contexts as identifiably queer. This is something they articulate consciously from the very beginning of the documentary: as one of the women says while being made up, ‘With this event, we hope to draw people’s attention to the existence of [the] gay community.’ The fact that this community exists not simply on the margins of society, but as an integral part of it, is emphasized: as one of the grooms says to the camera, and to the crowd at Qianmen, ‘You, and your friends, classmates, family members, colleagues. . . They may be gay too. Except that you don’t know about them.’ (Luke Robinson, Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street, p. 124.)
Rigo Maldonado, Fade to White, 2015 – 7:52 min. Rigo Maldonado’s short film reminds the viewer that nothing completely disappears. The film beings with a white flickering glare that fades away to brown skin. A small white drip of paint slides down towards a dark brown nipple. Slowly, methodically, a wide paintbrush moves steadily over the flesh. The sharp contrast between white and brown is heightened by the figure standing against a white wall. Maldonado casts a queer immigrant rights activist to stand statuesque and be covered in white paint. During the entire film the camera follows the paintbrush moving to various parts of the man’s body. Maldonado’s work reveals that despite borders, poverty, language barriers, exile, queer and trans people of color and immigrants persist. There remains a shadow, a memory, a trace. (Jessica Lopez Lyman, Rebellion Takes Many Forms, In V Parts)
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PROJECTION D Cheryl Dunye, The Watermelon Woman, 1996 – 90 min.
Cheri Gaulke, Cycle of the Witch, 2013 – 12 min.
Set in Philadelphia, The Watermelon Woman is the story of Cheryl (Cheryl Dunye), a twenty-something black lesbian struggling to make a documentary about Fae Richards, a beautiful and elusive 1930s black film actress popularly known as “The Watermelon Woman.” While uncovering the meaning of Fae Richards’ life, Cheryl experiences a total upheaval of her personal life. Her love affair with Diana (Guinevere Turner), a beautiful white woman, and her interactions with the gay and black communities are subject to the comic yet biting criticism of her best friend Tamara (Valarie Walker.) Meanwhile, each answer Cheryl discovers about The Watermelon Woman evokes a flurry of new questions about herself and her future. At the film’s conclusion, the Watermelon Woman is clearly a metaphor for Cheryl’s search for identity, community, and love. (cheryldunye.com)
Artist Cheri Gaulke utilizes personal narrative, family photographs, images of nature, and segments from previous work to meditate on the cycle of life. She courageously shares a story of her transformation from a young girl, the daughter of a prominent Lutheran minister in the Midwest, into an artist, lesbian and “born-again-bruja” in Los Angeles. Her montaged journey leads us through the introduction of a specific doctrine to a child, the questioning of a young adult, the rejection of faith and family, the embrace of one’s path, and the creation of one’s own community. Cycle of the Witch is a continuation of Gaulke’s thirty-five-year investigation into themes of religion, sexual politics, identity, and the environment. (Meg Linton, Tapping the Third Realm)
Barbara Hammer & Paula Levine, Two Bad Daughters, 1988 – 12 min. Sadie Benning, Jollies, 1990 – 12 min. In Jollies, Benning gives a chronology of her crushes and kisses, tracing the development of her nascent sexuality. Addressing the camera with an air of seduction and romance, Benning allows the viewer a sense of her anxiety and delight as she comes to realize her lesbian identity. (Video Data Bank)
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I made Two Bad Daughters in 1988 with Paula Levine; we undertook this visual and sonoric play together to undercut the theoretical tone of the 1980s that “the author was dead.” By making ourselves a double author and using artifacts from “the father’s house” as playthings, we hoped to subvert theory reinstating ourselves as artists within a historical context. Through play you can find so many new ways to achieve, to make, to change without a whole lot of baggage. Play is considered light and unthreatening, and this makes it a strategy to work around or burrow underneath sticky conundrums. (As told by Barbara Hammer to Jarrett Earnest, Brooklyn Rail)
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PROJECTION E Marlon Riggs, Tongues Untied, 1989 – 55 min.
Twiggy Pucci Garçon & Sara Jordenö, Kiki, 2016 – 96 min.
Tongues Untied was motivated by a singular imperative: to shatter America’s brutalizing silence around matters of sexual and racial difference. Yet despite a concerted smear and censorship campaign, perhaps even because of it, this work achieved its aim. The video documents a nationwide community of voices – some quietly poetic, some undeniably raw and angry – which together challenge society’s most deeply entrenched myths about what it means to be black, gay, a man, and above all, human. My struggle has allowed me to transcend that sense of shame and stigma identified with my being a black gay man. Having come through that fire, they can’t touch me. (Marlon T. Riggs)
Twenty-five years after the ballroom scene emerged in mainstream culture via Madonna’s “Vogue” and the documentary Paris is Burning, director Sara Jordenö, in collaboration with Haus of Pucci founder Twiggy Pucci Garçon, chronicles a very different artistic/activist LGBTQ youth of color subculture, named the Kiki Scene. Her film follows seven participants from the Kiki community over four years as they prepare for and offer spectacular performances at Kiki balls while simultaneously surviving homelessness, illness, and prejudice, and demanding visibility and real political power. Following the motto “Not About Us Without Us,” the film was made with the support and trust of the Kiki Scene participants and includes a score by renowned Ballroom and Voguing Producer Collective Qween Beat. (Colgate University)
Isaac Julien, Looking for Langston, 1989 – 60 min. I want to make a work that may have intellectual ideas that are embedded in cultural and artistic theory, but I also want to transcend them. And transcending those ideas means to try and grapple with the possibility of the work being seen by as wide an audience as possible, but without trying to make theory reductive and to simplify it in any way. I think in a work like Looking for Langston, it is beautiful enough to attract a wide audience but at the same time it retains its integrity in terms of its political and cultural ideas. Of course, it is a work about black gay desire and there had not been many works about that subject matter. So, it took a long time to research for and make a work like that—a work that for me would feel successful in terms of communicating those themes. (Isaac Julian as told to Anna Dickie, November 11, 2014, Ocula.)
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PROJECTION F
Jari Osborne, Picture This, 2017 – 33 min. What does it mean to be disabled and desirable? In Picture This, a new documentary by Jari Osborne, we meet Andrew Gurza, a self-described “queer cripple” who has made it his mission to make sex and disability part of the public discourse. (National Film Board of Canada)
Mona Smith, Honored by the Moon, 1990 – 15 min. In this upbeat and empowering film, Native American lesbians and gay men speak of their unique historical and spiritual role. Within many indigenous nations, homosexuality and wider gender definitions were often associated with the power to bridge worlds. Interviews with leading activists and personal testimony attest to the positive and painful experiences of being Native and gay. Produced by Smith (Dakota) for the Minnesota American Indian AIDS Task Force (now the Indigenous People’s Task Force) to raise issues of homophobia within the Indian community, this ground-breaking documentary is also an important contribution to culturally sensitive discussions of homosexuality. (Women Make Movies)
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FRONT OF THE GALLERY Jeffrey Gibson, I Was Here, 2018 – 8:15 min. © Jeffrey Gibson and Kavi Gupta, Chicago. Videography by Brett Novak Single-channel video
I Was Here documents and reimagines a day in the life of Macy, a trans woman living on a Choctaw reservation in Mississippi. When I began the video I wasn’t thinking about trans rights. It was more “This person represents my fears of who I am in Mississippi,” where my family is from. The work is a hybrid of documentary and invented narrative and is based on both my reverence for and fear of the Mississippi land. When I meet members of the LGBT community living on reservations, I see what it could be like. I don’t think I could do it. I’m impressed by their strength and resilience. Both of my grandfathers established Indian churches within the community—Southern Baptist churches—and my relationship to religion was something I wanted to explore. And so, for the video, I had Macy share her daily routines and then walk through the woods and ultimately baptize herself in a lake. (As told by Jeffrey Gibson to Zack Hatfield, Artforum, November 5, 2018.)
SIDE OF THE GALLERY Derek Jarman, Blue, 1993 – 79 min. Digital presentation of 35 mm film
Blue features a single unwavering shot of the color blue with a deeply personal and poetic voiceover by Derek Jarman and actors Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry, and John Quentin, and an exceptional ambient musical soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner with contributions from Brian Eno, Coil, Momus, and Erik Satie. Made in the year before his untimely death, Blue is a deeply courageous and moving account of Jarman’s struggle with AIDSrelated illness which caused partial blindness and bouts of seeing blue light, as well as a mediation on the void as explored by artist Yves Klein and his patented paint color International Klein Blue. (The Getty Center)
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