Queering Plunder presents recent video
installations by five of this country’s most provocative and
accomplished producers: Aleesa Cohene, Nelson Henricks, Dara
Gellman and Leslie Peters (in collaboration) and Benny Nemerofsky
Ramsay. Their four works on exhibition at the Dunlop Regional
Art Gallery find connections in their unique capacity to challenge
heteronormative narratives in music, cinema and language.
Through their collective crush on found media, the
artists remake and remix the materials they’ve appropriated,
recontextualizing it to produce sophisticated, poetic and
counterintuitive examinations of the intersections of popular
media and a queer unconscious. It is at these intersections
that we find the artists asking us to dispense with familiar
understandings and move toward a new, queer kind of knowing.
In Queering Plunder, organized for Queer City Cinema
2006, there are no same-sex kisses or coming out stories.
In place of these tropes, we are presented instead with perspectives:
rich in social and political critique, these works trace a
powerful queer arc that speaks to the libratory absence of
the familiar. As we engage with this work we find ourselves
searching for something, trying to organize the fragments,
waiting for answers, combing the landscape, sifting through
the evidence and, though we are seduced by the momentum of
this looking, we come up empty-handed. It is here that we
recognize that the works deliberately embrace a kind of psychic
instability so that in our failure to find - that is, our
inability to locate an emblematic narrative, a predetermined
order, an appropriate emotion, the right words - we are strangely
satisfied and, somehow, free.
These four video installations are difficult projects to stabilize
within any existing discourse. Though the works have a certain
rambunctiousness to them, they are thorough and calculated
in their borrowings, swift in their reconstructions and strategic
in their presentation. In Ready
to Cope by Aleesa Cohene, one is quickly consumed by
a profound sadness as each piece of the security blanket is
pulled away. Children dominate an emotional trajectory that
unites fragments from horror and science-fiction films, thrillers,
self-help guides and motivational instruction videos. Alluding
to a “deep wordless knowledge” . Ready
to Cope is made from the moments before and after,
when the plot is at an impasse and the dialogue is silenced,
forming a new narrative of defensiveness and self-protection.
In Dara Gellman and Leslie Peters’ projection, Impossible
Landscapes, we are drawn helplessly into an irreducible
image. Its magnificent proportions provoke notions of violence
and ecstasy, and present us with a world where benevolence
is suspect, and narratives both real and imagined are intertwined.
In Lyric by Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, we share in
the artist’s manic remixing of his own new pop narrative,
using sound bites collected from 1000 love songs. His iPod
heartbreak is as enduring as it is potentially infinite, his
performance an exquisite corpse of emotions, his Libretto
a new poetry of loss where everything gets started but nothing
ever finished. And finally, in the dual projection Satellite,
Nelson Henricks combines found footage and techno beats to
question western societies’ ongoing obsession with science,
technology and the future. With a dark signature wit, Henricks
turns a society gone word-crazy on its metaphorical
ear and leaves us with more questions than there could ever
be answers.
In a world where queer is a simultaneously empty
and overflowing signifier and no longer easily definable,
these works rely on found media in order to offer us a new
way of thinking about the queer self and perhaps a new, culturally
imperative, queer way of knowing. Queer in its strangeness,
in its imperceptibility, and in its perversion of the knowledge
project – are these pieces not, in some way, telling us it’s
OK (if not absolutely necessary) to not know?
And like the giddiness that threatens us on the edge of this
idea, these works are irrepressible and unstoppable.
The Queering Plunder exhibition runs from November 17,
2006 to January 14, 2007 at the Dunlop Art Gallery's Central
Gallery. The show was curated by Deirdre
Logue.
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