WESTBETH GALLERY: Pride Etiquette: Works on gender, identity and sexuality. June 24 – July 8, 2012

PRIDE ETIQUETTE
Works on Gender, Identity, and Sexuality by Kenneth Sean Golden, Shari Diamond, Paulo Freitas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jonathan Leiter, and Carlos Gutierrez-Solana.

June 24 – July 8, 2012

Westbeth Art Gallery
55 Bethume Street @ Washington Street
New York, NY 10014
Gallery hours: Thursday to Sunday 1:00 pm to 6:00 pm.

The exhibition PRIDE ETIQUETTE highlights works in a variety of media by Kenneth Sean Golden, and some of his contemporaries, concerned with issues of sexuality, gender and identity.

Kenneth Sean Golden

’Work from his most recent print portfolio: Etiquette are 13” by 19” prints which consist of montage figurative elements, with fingerprints, including his own photos and appropriated images critiquing a physicality of how we present gender. Layering the subject matter, using selective “masking” techniques, both reveal and hide parts of the images while the layered fingerprints explore issues of identity and community. Text is also used and screened back over the image challenging the experience of viewing and reading. The text underscores some of his concerns. These can be mantras, positive affirmations, or just ideas/concepts that he’s exploring. Humor is also a very important element. Much of this work may be viewed at www.KennethSeanGolden.com.

Also included in the exhibition are earlier works by Golden that reference the body. One of his earlier pieces is a six and a half feet in diameter installation of a double wreath made up of prints of hands pinned together. This is his “digital concern” wreath, made of gum bichromates, palladium and cyanotypes from digital negatives. Two two-toned cyanotypes, each 23” X 35,” DNA made me gay, and Freaking Modernism will also be shown. In these works one finds text and more within the whorls of the fingerprints.

Shari Diamond

Photographic artist interested in the narrative, symbolic and poetic possibilities of imagery. Shari’s most recent work utilizes photography and the computer to explore current events see anew and imagine what might be. Also included in the exhibition, is a selection of Diamond’s earlier work exploring sexuality and gender; the effects of AIDS and other illnesses on people in her life; and the shape and weight of intimate relationships.” Her work can be seen online at www.sharidiamond.net.

Born and raised in Miami, Florida, Shari currently lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts 2008 Fellowship in Photography, two Brooklyn Arts Council Community Arts Grants, and was awarded residencies at Blue Mountain Center and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her work has been shown in numerous venues, including PS 122 Gallery, Art Projects International, The Alternative Museum and, most recently, at the Beit Ha’ir Museum in Tel Aviv.

Paulo Freitas

Painter working in oils. A self-taught artist, he started to paint in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, at a young age. Freitas has exhibited at Fort Copacabana, in Rio de Janeiro and Correio do Rio de Janeiro. His first public showing in New York City is currently at Chashama Gallery. He thinks that painting liberates the magic of color. Paulo was born in Pau Grande, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Carlos Gutierrez-Solana

Presents work from two bodies of work: Reverse Questionnaire and Shattered Dreams. In Reverse Questionnaire Gutierrez-Solana asks questions: “Is it possible your heterosexuality stems from a neurotic fear of others of the same sex?”

Jeffrey Hoone writing in Contact Sheet about Reverse Questionnaire says, “The breadth of human sexuality stretches between distant poles of desire, so our understanding of passion needs to be informed by an elastic perception.” This work reaches to a place that reverses our societal “fortunes,” as it were, by making heterosexuality suspect. The combined image/text panels urge us toward gay and lesbian canons and away from a problematic heterosexuality. “Considering the menace of hunger and overpopulation, can the human race survive if everyone were heterosexual?”

The questions come from a questionnaire reproduced in The New York Times but originally published in Working it out: The Newsletter for Gay and Lesbian Employment Issues. Companies in sensitivity training workshops use the questions. Questions often posed to gays and lesbians have simply been turned around to apply to heterosexuals. The images over which the questions are written are from “physique” magazines dating from the ‘40s to the ‘90s. The subliminal message is to conform in a world where the shoe is on the other foot: where gay and lesbian sexuality is the mainstream and heterosexuality is undesirable. The work questions our system, our choices, which we might have been if our society’s sexual expectations had been reversed.

The mixed-media collages titled Shattered Dreams were created between 1984 and 1995 from the detritus (broken glass and male images) from various performances titled “Poetic Visions/Shattered Dreams.” Thematically all refer to the AIDS crisis and the devastating toll it was taking on the gay community in general and Gutierrez-Solana’s own circle of friends in particular. Performances involved actions where the artist walked on sheets of glass covering multiple male images breaking the glass and crushing the male representations while frantically, and repeatedly, drawing the words: Poetic Visions/Shattered Dreams on large, hanging sheets of glass serving as transparent – and thus evanescent, drawing surfaces. These were then violently shattered. The whole effect being one of danger, sorrow, and fury.

Jonathan Leiter

Presents works from his In The Bedroom Series. The works in this series were developed after moving into his first house with his partner Mark. Leiter removed the nursery vinyl decals found on the walls of their new bedroom and added them to printed male gay pornographic images creating a powerful, tongue‐in-cheek dialogue between the innocence of childhood and its loss.

Jonathan was born in Uniontown, PA. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theater Arts & Design from Rutgers University. He currently lives and works in Staten Island, New York.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

An early work by , on loan from a private collection, will also be on display.

For additional information please contact the Visual Arts Chair at westbethg@gmail.com