Stand Close, It’s Shorter Than You Think: A show on feminist rage

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Opening reception with a performance by boychild: Saturday, April 20, 2013, 5-8pm (Performance at 7pm)

Purchase the catalogue for Stand Close here.

ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives in collaboration with Artist Curated Projects (ACP) presents Stand Close, It’s Shorter Than You Think: A show on feminist rage, co-curated by Katherine Brewer Ball and RJ Messineo with work by boychild, RJ Messineo, MPA and Guadalupe Rosales. The exhibition explores the promises and pitfalls of thinking with rage as a meditation, an inspiration, a medium, and a process.

In the 1960′s and 1970′s the United States became keenly aware of itself as a domestically violent space—from the death of Martin Luther King Jr., to the Watts Riots, to the Vietnam War. This public awareness coincided with the increasing momentum of second wave feminism and other radical public protest movements. But as “militant” organizations like The Black Panthers articulated, this violence did not originate from the left, but was a reaction to larger social structures that, in their refusal of social services for example, were already enacting violence on the poor, women, and people of color. As Pamela Haag explains, feminism “questioned not whether, but how violence would happen, how the body would be (ab)used or subjectivity compromised.” If this violence against marginalized bodies is inevitable, what are the most powerful stances from which we might confront its wide unending reach?

Rage is both a re-action and an action. It is felt in response to unequal power-dynamics such as sexism, transphobia, homophobia, and racism and the accumulation of these insults over time, lifetimes, and generations. Examining the way rage shapes and is expressed in the work of contemporary queer and feminist artists, Stand Close brings together the products and the process of rage. The work in the show ranges from the more direct visual semiotics of unrest in the performance work of MPA and boychild, to abstract meditations on power and loss in the drawing and painting works of RJ Messineo and Guadalupe Rosales. boychild’s performances—which employ costume, disguise, and changeability— are archived in traces across the internet referencing the in-between forms of queer cultural production and nightlife. RJ Messineo’s body-sized abstract assembled paintings raise questions about authorship and legibility as they play on what it means to make a mark. MPA’s collection of documents from her performances and her installation in the archive propose experiments in direct action, in meditation, and in the speculative alterations of power and framing. Guadalupe Rosales’ photographs, sculptures and meticulous hand-drawn geometric shapes limn relationships between mourning and rage in the return home.

Stand Close is curated by Katherine Brewer Ball and RJ Messineo as part of Artist Curated Projects (ACP) at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives. Support for the exhibition Stand Closeis provided by the independent 501-c3 ONE Archives. Support for the exhibition publication is provided by the USC Libraries.

Bios

boychild is a performance artist whose body of work is the body in space and time. The hybridity of human and nonhuman. The #apocalypse#. boychild is interested in performance as an energetic exchange; the language spoken most clearly. boychild is boychild is not boychild is is.

Katherine Brewer Ball is a PhD candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where she also teaches in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. She is currently finishing her dissertation, “The Only Way Out is In: Performative Engagements of Escape in Contemporary American Art.” Brewer Ball’s work focuses on the promise of escape, queer and minoritarian political performance, and twentieth-century visual art. Her writing has been published in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and The Arts, and Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus.

RJ Messineo is an artist currently living and working in western MA.  Her painting practice borrows from sculpture and performance and works through issues of identity, intimacy and power through abstraction and through formal and material moves.  She received her MFA from UCLA in 2009 and her work has shown at REDCAT, Imprenta, Steve Turner Contemporary, Redling Fine Art and with Artist Curated Projects in Los Angeles; in collaboration with Wu Tsang at Clifton Benevento in NY; and at The exhibition Agency in Chicago. She is currently developing “Burn the Man: A Western Massachusetts Party,” a queer separatist free-form outdoor performance festival.

MPA is an exhibitionist following a living art practice. Her solo and  collaborative works focus on performance in combination with  photography, film, text, and sculpture. These acts, enriched with  ritual, service a political exercise of the body stimulating questions  for participation, resistance, and the intimacy between both. Her live and installation work has been presented internationally including The Swiss Institute, the Stedelijk Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Leo Koenig Inc, The Kitchen, Larissa Goldston Gallery,  Higher Pictures, Pilot TV, Movement Research Festival, Yinka Shonibare’s Guest Projects, Zendai MOMA, and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Oaxaca in Mexico. She is a 2013 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artist Award. MPA currently lives in Twentynine Palms, CA.

Guadalupe Rosales is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work takes form of drawing, sculpture, costuming, photography, often collaboratively. Rosales’ work has been exhibited at Momenta Art (Brooklyn, NY), Participant Inc. (New York, NY), Danspace Project (New York, NY), Jack Studios (New York, NY), Nicelle Beauchene Gallery (New York, NY), Contemporary Museum (Baltimore, MD), New Image (Los Angeles, CA), Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY) among others. Her work has been published in K48, LTTR “Positively Nasty” Issue #5, Paris/LA, Death Magazine and The St Claire magazine. She is a regular contributor to DIS Magazine, I Heart Photograph and Little Paper Planes.

About Artist Curated Projects (ACP)

Artist Curated Projects (ACP) is an apartment-based gallery in Los Angeles founded by artists Eve Fowler and Lucas Michael that focuses on underrepresented artists and ephemeral programs. Since 2008, it has organized exhibitions that have contributed to the cultural fabric of Los Angeles while providing an opportunity to over 120 artists to show their work to the community, engage in dialogue, and explore their curatorial ideas. The goal is to nurture a shared community space where artists can develop their curatorial ideas and show the work of their peers while promoting and creating connections with others from multiple disciplines and at different stages of their practices.

For more information about ACP, click here.

Image: (Top) Photograph of a tearoom from an article by Laud Humphreys, “Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places,” published in Trans-action (January 1970), 20-21. Photographer unknown. Laud Humphreys Papers. ONE Archives at the USC Libraries