My Queer Valentine
MY QUEER VALENTINE
Target Gallery | Torpedo Factory
January 25 - March 8, 2020
Reception: Friday February 14, 2020 // 7:00-9:00 pm
Queer identity, and our relationship to queerness, is distinguishable through an acute, neverending process of unpacking, deconstructing, releasing, detaching, and falling apart. It’s a daily exercise in forgetting everything we’ve been taught, learned, and forcibly consumed about ourselves. Judith Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure argues that forgetting in itself is an inherently queer tactic of disruption and resistance. While My Queer Valentine has everything to do with the relationship to those around us, it’s also equally invested in a queer ontology, meaning the relationship we have with our queer realities, and the ways in which queerness shapes and informs our lived experience. My Queer Valentine is as much a love letter to ourselves as it is a disclosing of longing to our community.
The works included in My Queer Valentine — including photography, painting, sculpture, installation, and mixed media — trace an incoherent road map of the ability for queerness to temporarily bind the parts that resist legibility, to give words and meaning to those unnameable parts, and to reveal the gestures and expressions that animate a politics of disrespectability and nonconformity.
I’ve dedicated my career to interrogating, unpacking, discovering, decoding, and elevating the intricate beauty of queer intimacy, pleasure, and desire. Perceiving the nuances of our bodies, gestures, and expressions that leave a trace, allow us to find one another, and tethers together a language all our own. My Queer Valentine is that trace, one that often leaves its indelible mark and allows us to find our way back to ourselves.
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Exhibiting artists: Nicholas Aiden, Veronica Barker-Barzel, Brandin Barón, Adam David Bencomo, Miki Beyer, Louis Chavez, Mandy Chesney, Evin Dubois, Aurele Gould, Cat Gunn, Linda Hesh, Rachael McArthur, Annika Papke, Lucas J. Rougeux, Todd Stonnell, and Matt Storm.