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CLOSED _________________________ WHEN GIRLS WERE BOYS AND BOYS WERE GIRLS February 19 - August 6, 2010 This exhibition is presented in the windows of the Leslie/Lohman Gallery
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Grace Moon
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Jen P. Harris |
When Girls Were Boys and Boys Were Girls is an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Grace Moon and Jen P. Harris. Focusing on portraiture, the artists use the lens to explore themes of romance, androgyny and homosexuality in queer pop culture. Referencing cinematic stills, Harris creates closely cropped charcoal drawings of couples embracing. By slightly altering her characters, she releases herself of heterosexual stereotypes, obscuring their faces and leaving the viewer with a vaguely familiar scene. With a background in traditional oil painting, Moon shows Western imagery in the way of lineage tradition. Her colorful paintings of gay subjects can be seen in the context of queer identity in a way that is reminiscent of Mapplethorpe and Opie. — Cora Lambert |
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_____________________ Grace Moon I love the tradition of oil painting. All of contemporary Western imagery (photography, film, video, digital arts) rests upon. Renaissance and Baroque painters. When I paint I feel like I participate in a dialogue about pigment, medium and brush with the founding masters. The meaning of painting today is found in the lineage of the tradition. I paint the figure because the spirit in painting flows from the portrait. My interest in Queer portraiture can be scene in the context of queer identity and exploration that began with Robert Mappelthorpe, and picked up by Catherine Opie. I'm one of a handful of artists who paint in this genre. All four images are (top to bottom): Johnny T, 36 x 34", oil on canvas |
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_______________________ Jen P. Harris With American Kiss, I have continued my investigation of interacting figures in pictorial space with an interest in collapsing binary notions about gender and sexuality. This project re-imagines a well-known and prevalent image in pop culture, presenting androgynous and queer couples in a cinematic light. The paintings draw from kitsch representations of romance (pulp novel covers, movie posters) and pastoral art. Rather than depicting the heterosexual stereotype, I obscured the features of the faces and bodies to make them androgynous. Saturated colors and a skewed gravitational and perspectival scheme speak to the psychosomatic aspects of human intimacy: feelings of unreality, loss of balance and heightened perceptual experience. The black and white works are counterpoints to the paintings – they answer the garish palette with a monochromatic emotiveness. Close cropping and simplification reveals something about the abstraction of the figures, the dissolution of two separate identities inside the moment of intimacy. In these works, I wanted to draw a connection between the proverbial image of romance – the kiss – and homosexual love and desire. All four images are (top to bottom): |
_________________________________________________ Best viewing time is after sundown.
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___________________________________________________________ See CALENDAR for schedule of upcoming exhibitions and events.
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