黑料不打烊

Practice Gallery is pleased to present Barbershop: The Art of Queer Failure by artist Ace Lehner. A multimedia installation and performance work, Lehner鈥檚 Barbershop is a multimedia installation and performance work that engages queerness, failure, and masculinity masquerading as haircuts, all in a space modeled on the iconic barbershop. About this work, Lehner writes, 

Failure has been part of queerness since the terms鈥� reclamation in the 1980s. Queerness as identity and method fails to perform in ways that mainstream culture encourages. Queers fail to perform normatively when it comes to romantic partners, sexualities, gender identities, family structures, aesthetics, world making, and much more. Queer and queerness fail on purpose to be normative and instead throw norms, essentialism, and givens into question. Queers and queerness fail on purpose as a means of creating other possibilities.

Barbershop: The Art of Queer Failure, is an installation and social practice performance piece that applies scholar Jack Halberstam鈥檚 concept of queer failure to the form of the barbershop. On the surface, the design and function of the site-responsive work mimics a heteropatriarchal, cis-normative barbershop. However, it proposes aesthetics not associated with barbershop masculinity, nor is the project鈥檚 means of exchange built around the perpetuation of capitalistic modes of interaction. Failure here becomes a productive way of proposing alternatives. Barbershop: The Art of Queer Failure, forwards queer failure as a means of playfully intervening in a cultural location wherein typically heteropatriarchal, binary cisgender norms are produced and perpetuated, de-essentializing gender via a playful utopian space of porous, ephemeral queer/trans community. The impetus for the project came out of the artist鈥檚 dismay that there are diminishing number of places for LGBTQIA+ people to congregate and that historically, many queer spaces were bars, prohibitive to those who are averse to alcohol and those not of age.