Just Turn On With Me And You’re Not Alone: “A Selection From The Greer Lankton Archive” At The Mattress Factory
Art

Just Turn On With Me And You’re Not Alone: “A Selection From The Greer Lankton Archive” At The Mattress Factory

In her essay “Video Remains: Nostalgia, Technology and Queer Archive Activism,” Alexandra Juhasz discusses the importance of “queer archive activism” in preserving the lives of queer folks. Speaking in reference to her own documentary Video Remains, Juhasz explains, “It is not our suffering that is compelling but our willingness to name and record it, and in so doing, make communal and move into the present” (328). Continue reading

The Art Life: Nayland Blake’s “#IDrawEveryDay”
Art

The Art Life: Nayland Blake’s “#IDrawEveryDay”

“Writing & Drawing Are Sister Arts,” announces banners flowing from an old-timey quill pen on a drawing in Nayland Blake’s solo exhibition #IDrawEveryDay at Matthew Marks Gallery. Even though this proper, decadent illustration, culled from a book of 19th century penmanship exercises, seems at odds with the bulls, bears and bunnies in the surrounding drawings, the work, titled 6.1.15, acts as the show’s manifesto. As with the sister arts of writing and drawing, Blake reveals how daily drawing practice can record a visual memoir. Continue reading

Daddy’s Not-So Little Life: Preserving The Queer Southern Experience In The Archive Louis Zoellar Bickett
Art

Daddy’s Not-So Little Life: Preserving The Queer Southern Experience In The Archive Louis Zoellar Bickett

How do you measure a life? Through jars full of trash gathered during trips to Bourbon Street, Rodeo Drive and the King’s mecca, Graceland? Through a smattering of graveyard dirt collected from the graves of loved ones? Through precisely written tags on toothbrushes and assorted tchotchkes, saved for decades? Through a 585-page inventory? Well, according … Continue reading

Dead Tired Of Being So Bloody Positive: PosterVirus Reflects AIDS Activism Now
Art

Dead Tired Of Being So Bloody Positive: PosterVirus Reflects AIDS Activism Now

In her essay “Legacies of Trauma, Legacies of Activism” in the collection Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Ann Cvetkovich reflects, “The AIDS crisis, like any other traumatic encounters with death, has challenged our strategies for remembering the dead, forcing the invention of new forms of mourning and commemoration. The same is true, I would argue, … Continue reading

Parting Though I Absent Mourn: Cy Gavin’s Search For Kinship Through Bermuda’s Traumatic Histories
Art

Parting Though I Absent Mourn: Cy Gavin’s Search For Kinship Through Bermuda’s Traumatic Histories

Mirroring Hartman’s invocation of the ghosts of slavery to transform the present, Cy Gavin’s current exhibition At Heaven’s Command at Sargent’s Daughters enacts a similar personal and political pilgrimage. Rather than Ghana, Gavin’s vibrantly beautiful yet historically rich exhibition renders the results of tracing his own personal lineage to Bermuda. Continue reading

(Super) Heroic Melancholia In Mike Kelley’s ‘Kandors’ At Hauser & Wirth
Art

(Super) Heroic Melancholia In Mike Kelley’s ‘Kandors’ At Hauser & Wirth

Describing his later series Kandors, an extended reflection on Superman’s shrunken birthplace, Mike Kelley explains, “Kandor is a constant reminder of Superman’s lost homeland and functions metaphorically as a symbol of his alienated relationship to the planet where he now resides…Kandor now sits, frozen in time, a perpetual reminder of his inability to escape that … Continue reading