A Portrait of the Artist as Queer
I'd like to explore certain themes that the artist below, Caitlyn does and I've always been interested in wall projections like the way she is presenting her pieces.
Steven and I did a piece - projected photos we'd taken and curated and I'd organized into a sort of sequence. It was our series
"are you awake?"
I'm going to go over my notebooks and see if I can produce artwork for a coherent show to propose.
Submitted by: Caitlyn McMillan
Graduate student, Fine Arts
Canadian University Queer Services Conference 2012 organizer
My Masters of Fine Arts graduating exhibition, A Portrait of the Artist as Queer looks at myself as a queer identity. The eight-foot charcoal drawings mimic my body, allowing me to place ‘myself’ into projected spaces of North America. Each drawing expresses my confidence, pride, joy, apathy, embarrassment and shame as a queer person, all emotions that arise from different external influences that surround me. The figures are nearly naked, illustrating how my privacy, my sexuality is exposed when I am exposed as a queer person. This exposure is furthered by the overhead projections of places upon each drawing.
The images printed on acetate paper and hung to allow the viewer to change them from drawing to drawing, illustrates the viewer as an external influence on my identity. In a Portrait of the Artist as Queer I use my body to try and claim 90 spaces throughout North America, projected upon representations of my body.
The projected places are images from a traveling exploration titled Repressed Identities, which will soon be published in the University of Regina’s Queer Initiative’s (URQI) upcoming publication. The project comes from a class titled Representation, Embodiment and the City, where I was lucky enough to travel to Saskatoon and New York looking at Doreen Massey’s theories of how place has influence on the people within in, and in turn, the people in the space influence how it develops. As part of Repressed Identities, I continued to Thunder Bay and Banff where I created Urban Liminal, an exhibition alongside Niknaz Tavakolian, curated by Tabitha Minns. This project looked at the gendering and sexual influences in each city, and a selection of the images from my exploration became the images available in A Portrait of the Artist as Queer. Using these images from my exploration recreates my queer occupation of space, while illustrating that these places influence my body as well. The exhibition results in the representation of me as queer, temporarily occupying these spaces.
These spaces are important; temporary or permanent, allowing minority groups to gather. They create a sense of community, asserting a need for space, a physical demand of recognition. They allow small voices to be heard, for records of posters, documents and objects to create a history of these small, obscure cultures. Occupation of space asserts a political or social demand which may be the difference between a secret, lost society and a recognized social group.
These spaces are particularly important for queer identities. Being a minority group, they often turn to one another to find a safe space, yet there is no visible signifier of being queer beyond wearing clothing that ‘defies’ your assumed sex. Further, there is no land or country that house the queers, and certainly no gaydar, through we are definitely equipped with a knack for finding our own kind, more likely from years of seeking discovery of ourselves and others than it is an innate radar that calls to one another. Since we don’t have a nationality that identifies us, we have to construct our spaces. Since our bodies do not identify us, these spaces have to be permanent and visible. They have to call out to others who are afraid, to comfort those who feel alone. The gays are recruiting, but only to those to already belong with us. We seem to be gaining in numbers, but only because our spaces are allowing for a larger outreach to those who would be afraid to seek us out on their own.
A Portrait of the Artist as Queer definitely provided the University with a strong, visible, temporary queer space.
Caitlyn McMillan’s blog: www.caitlynjean.com
Steven and I did a piece - projected photos we'd taken and curated and I'd organized into a sort of sequence. It was our series
"are you awake?"
I'm going to go over my notebooks and see if I can produce artwork for a coherent show to propose.
Submitted by: Caitlyn McMillan
Graduate student, Fine Arts
Canadian University Queer Services Conference 2012 organizer
My Masters of Fine Arts graduating exhibition, A Portrait of the Artist as Queer looks at myself as a queer identity. The eight-foot charcoal drawings mimic my body, allowing me to place ‘myself’ into projected spaces of North America. Each drawing expresses my confidence, pride, joy, apathy, embarrassment and shame as a queer person, all emotions that arise from different external influences that surround me. The figures are nearly naked, illustrating how my privacy, my sexuality is exposed when I am exposed as a queer person. This exposure is furthered by the overhead projections of places upon each drawing.
The images printed on acetate paper and hung to allow the viewer to change them from drawing to drawing, illustrates the viewer as an external influence on my identity. In a Portrait of the Artist as Queer I use my body to try and claim 90 spaces throughout North America, projected upon representations of my body.
The projected places are images from a traveling exploration titled Repressed Identities, which will soon be published in the University of Regina’s Queer Initiative’s (URQI) upcoming publication. The project comes from a class titled Representation, Embodiment and the City, where I was lucky enough to travel to Saskatoon and New York looking at Doreen Massey’s theories of how place has influence on the people within in, and in turn, the people in the space influence how it develops. As part of Repressed Identities, I continued to Thunder Bay and Banff where I created Urban Liminal, an exhibition alongside Niknaz Tavakolian, curated by Tabitha Minns. This project looked at the gendering and sexual influences in each city, and a selection of the images from my exploration became the images available in A Portrait of the Artist as Queer. Using these images from my exploration recreates my queer occupation of space, while illustrating that these places influence my body as well. The exhibition results in the representation of me as queer, temporarily occupying these spaces.
These spaces are important; temporary or permanent, allowing minority groups to gather. They create a sense of community, asserting a need for space, a physical demand of recognition. They allow small voices to be heard, for records of posters, documents and objects to create a history of these small, obscure cultures. Occupation of space asserts a political or social demand which may be the difference between a secret, lost society and a recognized social group.
These spaces are particularly important for queer identities. Being a minority group, they often turn to one another to find a safe space, yet there is no visible signifier of being queer beyond wearing clothing that ‘defies’ your assumed sex. Further, there is no land or country that house the queers, and certainly no gaydar, through we are definitely equipped with a knack for finding our own kind, more likely from years of seeking discovery of ourselves and others than it is an innate radar that calls to one another. Since we don’t have a nationality that identifies us, we have to construct our spaces. Since our bodies do not identify us, these spaces have to be permanent and visible. They have to call out to others who are afraid, to comfort those who feel alone. The gays are recruiting, but only to those to already belong with us. We seem to be gaining in numbers, but only because our spaces are allowing for a larger outreach to those who would be afraid to seek us out on their own.
A Portrait of the Artist as Queer definitely provided the University with a strong, visible, temporary queer space.
Caitlyn McMillan’s blog: www.caitlynjean.com