Re-Coded: Strategies of Queer Abstraction
Featuring Artists: Lisa McCleary, Paloma Jimenez, Kevin Quiles Bonilla, sal daña, Dolorx, Frank Erazo, Shunran Xue, AELITA
Curated by Dolorx
October 2, 2017, 6-8 PM
25 E 13th St, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10003
How can abstraction be utilized as a site for queerness? How can abstraction be re-appropriated as a political strategy for re-framing our thinking in regards to our identities and the function of our bodies? How can it function as a call to imagine different possibilities and the task of building better future conditions? Re-Coded proposes abstraction as a tactic of liberation against the violent demand to make sense.
Our queerness is a disruption and ambiguity is our power. Using the method of queer abstraction, we are able to recode the corporeal and create a space in which we can reside in constant flux, subverting the demanded to meet expectations and resist being stereotyped. The need for abstraction is the need to own, reclaim and fuck up existing language. If language doesn’t work, make your own or reject it entirely. It is the need to make room for our multiplicity and embrace what society deems as unnatural or immutable. If nature doesn’t work, trans-form it.
We are enough in that we exist. Queer abstraction resists dominate systems of classification and takes a stance against the presentation of our culturally marked bodies as compulsory evidence of our existence. The work in this show presents “queer” as an operation in which legibility through normative systems of logic is challenged, and as a space for identity to exist as infinity.
