The Left Hand of Darkness

The Left Hand of Darkness, a group exhibition curated by Sarvia Jasso and Yasmine Dubois, borrows its title from the first feminist science fiction novel written by Ursula K. Le Guin in 1969. Set in a universe where individuals alternate between genders depending on the lunar cycle, the novel proposes an alternative social model that challenges traditional sexual dimorphism. After being transported from a heteronormative society to this new planet, the narrator states, ‘[…] my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gathenian first as a man then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own.’ During this journey, he is immersed in a world that redefines gender and sexual identities as we know them. Using the novel as a point of departure, the exhibition looks at artists who are playing with the dynamics of gender representation within a contemporary context.

Michael Bilsborough’s new mural, Within Reach, depicts an epic, polysexual bacchanal. The figures are suspended in a grid, which both supports and supplants the sensual gratification of the orgy pictured within the space. Paying particular attention to how architectural spaces orchestrate human interaction, Bilsborough’s images are much more than wistful visions of uninhibited fantasies. In Kathryn Garcia’s triptych drawing, a sprawled-out, slender figure claws at its own skin. Its idealized form embodies both masculine and feminine characteristics, while also exploring a constant shift between the two. At once ethereal and diabolical, Garcia illustrates this transitory moment with acute sensibility. Similarly, in Monica Bonvicini’s Red Dot on Parking Lot a sole figure dressed in red lays in the middle of an empty lot. The image invokes feelings of isolation and displacement, suggesting a state of flux.

Tara Mateik’s interest in Psychosexual Metamorphosis, a condition recorded in Psychopathia Sexualis, a taxonomy of sexual aberrations first published in 1886, inspired her work Case 133. The subject of this particular study called himself the Countess V and spent his days in bed acting like a lady of noble position, wearing his hair done up in a knot and breasts that were made out of rolls of bread. An audio recording from the case study is played on a turntable that simultaneously spins a zoetrope, which reveals the Countess’ animated transformation from male to female and vice versa. Matthias Vriens turns his attention to the man-made vagina and the visual construction of new forms of trans-sex. Here, celebratory sexuality, which is the undercurrent of all his photographs, is laid bare.

Matt Greene’s The Pink Room and The White Shoes investigate fantasy and the inability to manifest it in reality. Playing with notions of voyeurism within the history of painting, Greene inverts the male gaze in a way that both appropriates and challenges feminist discourse regarding the representation of women. In Sarah Lucas’ Man Versus Human Nature, a rusty bed frame is turned on its side while pantyhose and a bucket dangle from a pair of suspenders. Using these ordinary objects to question how they have become feminine and masculine signifiers, her investigation of gender roles challenges our preconceived notions.

Tracey Rose’s video, Mousie Mit Blubooi, unravels the trauma that comes with love, while Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin’s collaborative sculpture, Agenda Pusher, uses a grotesque aesthetic to explore non-traditional, dysfunctional familial structures. In both works, hierarchical roles are overthrown and replaced with absurdly chaotic scenes of everyday life. Trecartin’s video, (Tommy Chat Just Emailed Me.), exemplifies how the dispersion of information in this new technological era has shed light on multiple ways of experiencing sexuality.

In a photograph by Tobaron Waxman, the artist is the protagonist in a rapturous scene that references Chagall’s crucifixion paintings and the primordial homoerotic scene of the Holy Lance with a new Queer iconography. Peytach Eynayim, a name implicating God as site, means ‘(the place of) Open Eyes’ in Hebrew, i.e. Truth in space-time. This references the crossroads where Tamar waits for Judah in this biblical story about love, prostitution, revelation and gendered sexual agency.

Paul Kopkau’s drawings are part of his comic series, Girlfriends. Playing with gay stereotypes that range from the party queen to the dominatrix, Kopkau shows how trying to assimilate can be both humorous and tragic. Paired with these drawings, his sculpture The Vulgar Minimalist, is a direct reference to Yves Klein’s Blue and the pitfalls of minimalism. But unlike the minimalists, who opted to work with industrial materials, Kopkau not only subverts the notion of masculinity by creating paper mache blue balls, but also by imbuing them with homosexual implications. Slava Mogutin’s photographs, which disclose and celebrate macho-on-macho eroticism, capture a queer subculture that does not identify itself with the mainstream. Mogutin defies the conventions of the male nude by documenting it in a raw style that does not fetishize his subjects, but instead makes a political statement about gay masculinity. He also comments on unconventional gender role-play and transgressive sexuality that often involves violence and kink.

Employing a conceptual approach, C.R.E.E.,P. investigates the relationship between language and the acquisition of gender identity in Perverted By Language. Appropriating the title of the 1982 album by the seminal experimental punk group The Fall, this text piece explores how language is embedded with codes that further propagate or, in this case, abolish gender categories. Continuing his exploration of social exchange as an art form, Michael Portnoy (aka the Director of Behavior) uses language to create a game of sex dice, Kimbaw the loam! (Ways to Put People, for 2 persons), which asks that the participants step outside of their comfort zone.

The Project Midtown 37 West 57th Street, 3rd Floor, NY http://www.elproyecto.com/

Editor’s note: I think you might have to be there! 🙂