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A queer month in the visual arts
Report from First Thursday in June
by Will Shank
 Two
queer-related exhibitions at local galleries dominate the art
landscape during this Month of Pride.
Life
After Death: Embracing the Queer Widow is a ground-breaking
installation that addresses, perhaps for the first time, the identity
of the survivor of a gay union which ends in death. As part of the
National Queer Arts Festival 2001, eight local creative people, among
them performance artists, sculptors, poets, singer/songwriters, and
painters, were chosen for this juried exhibition, which continues at
Space 743 through July 28th. A central circle of panels is a metaphor
for the "embrace" of this outsider, the Queer Widow, and
each artist has presented an "inner" panel representing his
own feelings, and an "outer" panel, which is the face he
presents to the world.
The
collaborative circle is surrounded by the individual works of these
bereaved writers and artists. There are tear-jerkers, and poet Yves
Moralex has prepared the visitor for them with his welcoming
"Wailing Wall," made of bricks of black Kleenex boxes. And
there are objects of sheer beauty, like Dan Pillers' life-size memento
mori boxes whose glass lids are
etched with poems of grief and hope. But there is also humor in, for
instance, Tim Clare's "The Look," a sly Jackie O. tribute
in which dark sunglasses symbolically replace the widow's veil. The
tragicomic duality of the subject is summed up in a wonderful piece
by Clare, a tondo portrait of a small dog, surrounded by a vortex of
text which reads, "My Lover Went to Heaven and All I Got Was
This Darn Chihuahua." A catalog is in production, and much of
the exhibition can be viewed at the website of curator Pillers: www.fagart.com
Peekaboo beefcake
Homoerotica
is gracefully woven into the paintings and monoprints of New York
artist Peter Hristoff, on view at Bucheon Gallery (540 Hayes St.)
through July 17th. The Istanbul-born Hristoff, who teaches at the
School of Visual Arts, is presenting new paintings in which the nude
male figure looms large, although it peeks in and out of veils of the
rich colors and symbolic patterns of Turkish textiles and kilims.
There is also a lyrical wall filled with framed monoprints, The Sean
Series, of one male model which has come to a close after many years
of collaboration.
The
high-key coloration of the manipulated prints on rice paper is much
more subtle than Hristoff's work on the paintings, and it provides
ambiguous patterns against which the single, or sometimes double,
male figure seems to struggle, or ultimately give in to. Sexy stuff.
"How
is the queer content accepted in Turkey?" I asked the artist.
"It is never commented on directly,"
he told me. Thank God for San Francisco. The show can be previewed
at www.bucheon.com. ...
Will Shank , "A Queer Month in the
Visual Arts", THE BAY AREA REPORTER, Vol.31 #25,
6/21/2001, p 81. |
