Anna-S-C

works from the past year, 

sequence: detail “Marsha’s Garland” (private collection in Gibraltar sold through Woman Made Gallery, Chicago) 

“Cinch, Pinch, Please, Poise” 

“About an Inch”

untitled, detail

Excerpt from “Pay It No Mind,” documentary on Marsha P Johnson.

This is the moment from the film that gives me goosebumps every time I watch it. Marsha was so full of unadulterated soul and passion for life, for celebration, for community. My experience of learning about Marsha changed the totally bizarrely backward conservative and classist attitude I admitted to myself that I had been harboring about certain material choices by people of my own LGBTQ community in art and life.

As her delivery in the video above suggests, all records indicate that Marsha was unabashedly herself. Marsha used the phrase “pay it no mind” to combat constant inquiries as to her gender, and thereby her ability to be conveniently defined by others. One might also think of this phrase as an insistence on positivity in the face of constant rejection, dehumanizing and discrimination by hegemonic society. Marsha was a figure made in her own image. Friends of hers recall her spending the last few dollars she had on flowers for her hair. To walk the streets of NYC in the 1980s as a black, male-assigned at birth body and to insist on the transformative power of affordable versions of cosmetic grandeur is a radical action. In a lighthearted way, you could say I am a recovering Glitter-Skepticist, working through exposure therapy. But really, my interest cannot be distilled to a thirst for sprinkling sparkles around and prettying things up so much as working through the visual and sensory cues that both welcomed me and terrified me as I came out and came into the fold of the Queer Community. When thinking of the shifts in aesthetic I have been cultivating over the course of grad school, I return to the question just posed to me by a (straight white middle class male) peer: what is it about a Queer aesthetic and being tawdry?

The only answer I can begin to construct is that not only is Queerness articulated visually multifarious in nature, but an aesthetic that reads to the hegemony as “tawdry” may be more about its tendency to associate materials from life that may have a lower class association, or give the appearance as being honest about what they are. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is a persistent hierarchy in our value placement with exactly where and in what context materials and objects enter our lives. The mere ability to keep an object (like false eyelashes, let’s say) at arm’s length and keep it over there, the more we continue to comfortably exist where we can ignore its complicated history and power inherent in its own plasticity and relationship to our bodies. 

What does one do when confronted with a piece of discarded brightly hued sequin fabric on the sidewalk? How might this experience change with a shift in duration or accumulation (one hundred instead of one, one wig worn in close proximity to you by six foot four/ broad shouldered/ brown skinned body in heels? What if nightclub music is playing? What if you are on a sidewalk cafe and a band of people wearing this “tawdry” gettup is marching toward you, banners in hand?

I also think about context. To display the ephemera or material imaginings of what might have been worn by Marsha P. Johnson, I created a work tentatively titled “P is for Pay It No Mind.” I thought about the material gesture to a body that is no longer with us, and perhaps was never considered to be fully present to begin with. I wonder about the relationship of our comfort level to acceptance and assimilation of minority bodies. For someone like Marsha, the levels of otherness were multiple. The placement of her tall, pigmented, smiling and heavily adorned body in a space of a comedy stage or modestly priced gay bar with a “drag brunch” for tourists on a sunny Pride weekend just might have the appealing familiarity of fulfilling expectations for what a body like hers is supposed to do and represent. The trouble, perhaps, comes when Marsha does something like stand up at Stonewall Inn in 1969 and combats the police for their brazen tactics. The trouble comes when she marches for equal rights and speaks on behalf of young homeless HIV positive youth. The trouble, perhaps, comes when her name is spoken in the context of an MFA program decades later, and her suspicious death has still never been investigated, a certain pair of Virginian grandparents ask if I’ve seen “that colored trans-gender-ed woman from Orange is the New Black on TIME magazine” who cable news fashion shows applaud for her “sass” and “flawless fashion” while these statistics internationally speak an ongoing and maddening truth.

In truth, I have begun to shed my fears or unsubstantiated and privileged concerns about being tokenized or charged with representing Queerness* or making decidedly Queer work while being a Queer-identified artist. I have been confronting this problematic relationship to certain materials in the world that I associated with a conformity to societal expectations of beauty, when upon further inspection and hours spent living with the thing in my studio (false eyelashes for example) I start to think instead of the radical impact of something so seemingly disposable and Walgreens-store-frivolous. 

Materials are powerful. In thinking of “Pay It No Mind,” I know think of the freedom that can also be found in being defined as or by Otherness. My mind pauses on a few distinct cultural moments of production: the very recent obsession with what Caitlyn Jenner wears in Vanity Fair, the subsequent Twitter storm between black male musicians and family members of Jenner, the Baltimore protests following Freddie Gray’s murder, the suicide of transgender homecoming king and youth activist Blake Brockington and of Kalief Browder just this week, the move towards passage of Marriage Equality, the arrest of trauma center protestors at the University of Chicago, and the experience of repeatedly clarifying the pronouns for referring to my partner and close friends. 

In this net, there are so many points of tension. In the piece “P is for Pay It No Mind” I am just beginning to articulate the process of taking pause to consider one moment, one gesture, one eyelash, and something so simple can speak to the ever-changing interconnected nature of community. I am grappling further with how to embed politic in a piece without feeling like it fails to move beyond the impossibility of including everything but the kitchen sink. In this piece, I alternate between appreciating the experience of looking through the webbing of eyelashes to see the shimmer and tear of the fabric beneath the acrylic transparent box, and feeling that the netting of the eyelashes is sufficiently telling for what I want to convey. My hope as the artist is that there may come a moment when you catch a glimpse of shimmer in the work and begin to reevaluate what a physical body (of human or object form) presents itself in space. 

“What would be required is a pure fluid in a free state, flowing without interruption, streaming over the surface of a full body...No mouth. No tongue. No teeth. No esophagus. No belly. No anus.” (Deleuze and Guattari, The Body Without Organs)

I know that I want to continue to fill in the “textile” of lash netting, but what I do not want to edit out of the sculpture is the element of serious play and dedication to individual autonomy over ones body and potential for transformation. In fact, working on this piece has led me to thinking about ways to sustain the viewer in a space where “trying things on” may be possible in the conceptual and literal sense.

Other than the netting of lashes, I experimented for the first time with a method of piping plasticized gel over a surface and pealing it up to make a net. I discovered quickly that the 20 by 16 foot net I made with hair, silicone, acrylic and latex caulking was subject to gravity and much more fragile than it originally appeared. When forming a net, each link added is dependent upon every link made prior-- each component of the net is crucial. The form is comprised of and inextricable from its series of accumulated humble gestures. A new link is, at once, a new opportunity for strengthening the chain, as well as a new burden of weight for the net to bear. When one bind is broken, the remaining tethers strain to compensate for the fall. 

There was something powerful, too, in the image of a rainbow colored net (strung between lavender walls in a gesture to decoration for celebration) giving way section by section and making an audible crack when it broke off from the larger form and the soft smack of the silicone hitting the floor. I also incorporated the smell of a musk. After reading Irigaray and Kathy Acker, I am hoping to incorporate more formal moves that draw on (and disorient or reorient) the viewer’s sensory experiences of sight, smell, touch, and perhaps taste. After the entirety of the net was left rolled onto itself, a merging of form occurred so that the net itself became a kind of buoy, so that when placed under the plexiglass vitrine it appears both precious and irreverent. In the piece’s current state, when the viewer peers through the structure to material beyond, the individual lashes blur together and become a haze of blackness. 

I want to continue working with materials that have a charge around them because of an implied direct contact with bodies. I also continue to be utterly transfixed by the process of netting and the many implications of knot-tying. From the initial studio impulse to reading Lacan’s study of the Boromean knot to define Self and the Other, to erotic macrame in BDSM communities and the elegance of making a net for Marsha P. Johnson’s body that never returned from the Hudson River, there is something about the accumulation of knots that sustains my current practice. 

Moving forward, I want to be as specific as possible about the aesthetic and conceptual implications of every aspect of the sculptural object and planning a larger project of space intervention. To focus on one, we cannot fully escape the interconnectivity of the whole. In thinking about gestures of love or positivity as radical actions, I return to the Berlant quote from “Love as a Properly Political Concept,” saying “we know that love, suffusing our bodies and our interest...can bear the weight of ambivalence and contradiction. But how far can the membrane stretch?” (690)

I had the opportunity to speak with Zackary Drucker on campus a couple weeks ago before her fantastic screening of 4 of her works (the most recent being “She Gone Rogue”) and what she was most excited about was her incredible friendship and ongoing collaboration with Flawless Sabrina. Sabrina, a she presents herself, is a grandparent-aged legend when so many young Queer youth are searching for one to see themselves in. She was and remains a matriarch of drag balls and a performer, muse, and den mother for hundreds of young gender variant drag pageant hopefuls since the late 50s.

I finally watched “The Queen” from 1968 and am totally bowled over by the gusto and dedication Sabrina and so many other mamas and grandmama Queers exhibited and used to do the hard work that so many of us don’t dare to attempt. I love the feel of the stills and moving images (excerpts) from Drucker’s work shot in Sabrina’s apartment (only 2 blocks from the Whitney). I am even more compelled by the contrast of that seductively mystical and the, quite literally, hyper-saturated environment with the framework of an archive.