Mar 27
Failure and Virtuosity: Contemporary Queer Video
This exhibition, curated by Carleton Art History Professor Ross Elfine, highlights the work of queer videomakers in the generations following pioneer filmmaker Jack Smith’s revolutionary incursions into visual culture. They share with Smith a belief in the utopian potential of queer aesthetics to remain separate from the strictures of heteronormative society.
In some cases, this means forwarding a sense of queer community that offers a distinct and realizable alternative to what we have come to see as the family. In others, queer artists have mined the formal means of video as a medium to divert this mass-media format toward other ends. In short, these artists all fail to live up to sociocultural expectations of how they should act, but they fail with absolute virtuosity.