#queerdear

The Gay Mafia is Real | images Anthea Black Elijah Burgher Edie Fake Miller & Shellabarger Dutes Miller Michael Peirson Ryan M Pfeiffer + Rebecca Walz Steve Reinke   Rosé Stan Shellabarger

Exhibition essay by David Getsy (download PDF) Performance by Rosé at 8pm on Friday, June 19

For the The Gay Mafia is Real, gallery owner and straight bear Scott Speh has invited LGBTQ artists on Western Exhibitions' roster to exhibit their own works alongside artists of their choosing. This group show will be presented in Western Exhibition's Gallery 2, alongside Edie Fake's solo show in Gallery 1, both opening during Chicago's Pride weekend. Art historian David Getsy will contribute an essay to the exhibition expanding on an interview in Chicago Magazine(1) published around the time of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, in which he was asked if a Gay Mafia exists in the art world. Both shows open with a public reception on Friday, June 19from 5 to 8pm, and will run through July 18, 2015. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

Coinciding with Chicago Pride, this game of curatorial tag puts into play the elective affinities and voluntary affiliations amongst artists whose gender and sexuality inform their work, explicitly or in less obvious ways. Although money and media often get credited as the glue of the art world, the contention of this show is that friendship and intellectual (and sometimes sexual) intercourse provides another framework for thinking about how art actually gets made. If the project room were twice as big, the show would map an even larger branching star of friends and lovers hot on the heels of a sexed up, gregarious, sometimes drunk and combative art. The Gay Mafia is not actually real. What does exist, however, are overlapping social worlds of artists, queer identified or not, having heated conversations with one another that eventuate in pictures, objects, actions and essays.

At 8pm on Friday, June 19, immediately after the opening reception, Rosé will present The Ar(i)es Meditations, a process performance on the ruminations of masculinity and its natural transmutation against itself. Involving sculpture, sound, movement, and text the performance melds the essence and structures of tribunals, binding together the artist and public to forge a catalyst for change.

I have been spending an awful lot of time thinking about the term "fag hag" and my feelings towards it. I've never really given it much thought, although i ran across a blog post about it the other day and it got me thinking... Although i HATE both the words "fag" and "hag", i don't have a problem being referred to as a "fag hag". Seeing as i completely surround myself with gay men and women, i find that it is a fitting term. This has always been a term of endearment and i take no offense to it. Although! I COMPLETELY reject the typical "fag hag" stereotype! I do not consider my friends accessories, they are people and deserve to be treated as such. I don't go out and actively LOOK for gay men to befriend, it's always just worked out that way. I love my friends, and i will be there as their fag hag for as long as they want me around.

My friend Nik once called me a "queer dear", I kinda like that... (random..?)

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Genius! Non-productive day, here I come :)