AGENDA: Queering Popular Media

If you’re in the Baltimore area, be sure to stop by Current Gallery this month. I’m included in a group exhibition titled AGENDA: Queering Popular Media. The show is curated by Jamillah James of Frontier Projects and will run from November 14th to December 5th.

From Current’s website:

AGENDA is interested in how queer subjectivity informs, and is mediated by, evolving technology, the media, and our present state of collective (un)consciousness; the use, abuse, and critique of popular media; and the creation of autonomous spaces for play, discourse, and protest. Mining the formal and narrative conventions of film and television, as well as the experimental opportunities afforded by new media, printed matter, and so forth, an illusory architecture emerges where both identities and histories are fluid. Themes of marginalized desires, conceptions of celebrity, genesis and reinvention, reconciling the self through community, and the quandaries of visibility and voyeurism will be explored as the symptoms of immediacy precipitated by our digital age. By refitting the lens through which popular culture and media are viewed and re-calibrating the gaze, AGENDA will present new models of activism and representation, and seeks to document a unique moment in history when the collapse of public and private is expected, and surveillance spells opportunity.

 

Other participating artists:

Rahne Alexander
Davey Ball & Levi Barringer
Owen Brightman
Alan Calpe
Dynasty Handbag
Edie Fake
Michael Farley
Kristen Gavin
K8 Hardy & Wynne Greenwood
Gabriel Held
Michael Kent
Sarah McKiel
Dylan Mira & Latham Zearfoss
Rebecca Nagle
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
Liz Rosenfeld
Mariadele Arcuri Rossoni
Xavier Schipani
Christopher Schulz
Emily Shinada
Hayley Silverman
Ryan Trecartin
Victor Van Bramer
Lex Young
Latham Zearfoss
 

Update 11/18/08: I recently found the press release for the show, which is worded a bit differently from the text above. The above text was originally used for the call for entry, so it’s nice to see a little something for the press release. I really like that in the press release, Jamillah reiterates was ‘queer’ means within the context of the show. My neighbor and I had a lengthy discussion on the idea of queer’ when I was figuring out what work to submit.

Baltimore, MD ~ Current Gallery is pleased to present Agenda: Queering Popular Media curated by Jamillah James for Frontier Projects. The exhibition examines how queer (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans) subjectivity informs, and is mediated by, evolving technology, the media, and popular culture. Through mining the formal and narrative conventions of film and television, revisiting printed matter as a traditional means of communication, and addressing symptoms of immediacy precipitated by the digital age, the participating artists in Agenda create autonomous spaces for play, discourse, and protest in which identities and histories are fluid.

Agenda also considers the traditional definition of “queer”—to make strange. The experimental opportunities afforded by new media (installation, performance, video, and internet-based art) provides the critical apparatus to question matters of representation and agency, the influence to radicalize other art making practices, and the platform to subvert and eschew aesthetic conventions.

Agenda documents the present state of collective (un)consciousness, with its interest attuned to the quandary of visibility and a cultural obsession with “others” outside of the self. The collapse of public and private is expected, and surveillance spells opportunity. By refitting the lens through which popular culture and the media are viewed and rabidly consumed, and re-calibrating the gaze, the artists featured in Agenda affirm that the personal is indeed political.

Update 11/19/08: A Best of Baltimore winning art blog titled There Were Ten Tigers has some pictures up from the reception. I’m excited by the spelling of my middle name appearing as “Augustino”.