Omniscient: Queer Documentation in an Image Culture
For decades, even centuries, queer visual culture has thrived by reinterpreting existing cultural images as a means of forging identity, finding community, and insisting on distinct representations. The result is a vibrant history of queer iconographies, many of which have percolated into popular visual culture. But what can queerness look like in our disorienting contemporary image landscape, in which billions of digital images are shared daily; social media has become more ubiquitous than print, film, and television combined; and online relevance has become a mechanism for survival? How do we experience identity amid today鈥檚 torrents of avatars, app-filtered selfies, and near-instantaneous obsolescence? How do we document queer culture going forward, when representation appears as a haze of possibilities?
OMNISCIENT presents a group of more than forty artists navigating these rapidly evolving visual languages through various strategies. They excavate and reclaim archives of Hollywood and popular culture; propose forms of queer monumentality and intergenerational memorialization; imagine alternatives to capitalist logics; and even sidestep representation in favor of sensory citations of the body, including sound and touch. These artists鈥 works mark the legacy of twentieth-century visual histories while negotiating the accelerating image cultures of the present鈥攎apping queer cultural identity with a particular affection, skepticism, and prescience arrived at from the social margins.
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For decades, even centuries, queer visual culture has thrived by reinterpreting existing cultural images as a means of forging identity, finding community, and insisting on distinct representations. The result is a vibrant history of queer iconographies, many of which have percolated into popular visual culture. But what can queerness look like in our disorienting contemporary image landscape, in which billions of digital images are shared daily; social media has become more ubiquitous than print, film, and television combined; and online relevance has become a mechanism for survival? How do we experience identity amid today鈥檚 torrents of avatars, app-filtered selfies, and near-instantaneous obsolescence? How do we document queer culture going forward, when representation appears as a haze of possibilities?
OMNISCIENT presents a group of more than forty artists navigating these rapidly evolving visual languages through various strategies. They excavate and reclaim archives of Hollywood and popular culture; propose forms of queer monumentality and intergenerational memorialization; imagine alternatives to capitalist logics; and even sidestep representation in favor of sensory citations of the body, including sound and touch. These artists鈥 works mark the legacy of twentieth-century visual histories while negotiating the accelerating image cultures of the present鈥攎apping queer cultural identity with a particular affection, skepticism, and prescience arrived at from the social margins.
Artists on show
- Aliza Shvarts
- Angela Dufresne
- Anna Sew Hoy
- Brad Jones
- Camilo Godoy
- Carrie Moyer
- Catalina Schliebener
- Chitra Ganesh
- Deborah Kass
- Edith Isaac Rose
- Em North
- Erik Hanson
- Esvin Alarcón Lam
- Frederick Weston
- Glenn Ligon
- Izidora Leber Lethe
- Jason Villegas
- Jennifer Coates
- Jonny Sopotiuk
- José Rafael Perozo
- Joy Episalla
- Justin Allen
- Kang Seung Lee
- Kerry Downey
- Liz Collins
- LJ Roberts
- Loring McAlpin
- Nicki Green
- Omar Mismar
- Pacifico Silano
- Pamela Sneed
- Paul Wong
- Roey Heifetz
- Russell Perkins
- Sarah E. Brook
- Sheila Pepe
- Stephen Andrews
- Tahir Carl Karmali
- Thomas Tomczak
- Wells Chandler
- Yevgeniy Fiks
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