Jared Buckhiester, Potential Subject at 68MPH 1-85 SC State Line, 2021, archival inkjet print, image courtesy of the artist. [Image description: the driver’s side window of a yellow truck viewed from below, looking up. The bottom half of a man’s face, his chin, beard, lips, top row of teeth, are visible on the right side of the image, looking out from inside the cab of the truck. A reflection of the sky and green trees can be seen on the left quadrant of the image.]
Join us for a closing reception, performances, and a catalog release for BOY BOX, curated by Angela Conant, wIth work by: Jared Buckhiester, CAConrad, Deborah Czeresko, Karen Yvonne Hall, BB Kenda, Rose Nestler, Sarada Rauch, Marion Scemama and David Wojnarowicz, Vincent Tiley, Christopher Udemezue, Angela Washko.
Performance by Karen Yvonne Hall as "Daren" and reading by Christopher Udemezue at 7 pm.
Fundraiser to support disaster relief in Haiti organized by ragganyc.com.
Christopher Udemezue reading:
“I need to know that you will be here where he can’t find us when I knock my key”
2021
Christopher Udemezue
Karen Yvonne Hall Performance of two operatic pieces:
"Soy Carlos"
2020
The Artist, Karen Yvonne Hall, heard this musical piece coming out of the drain while washing dishes. Due to their auditory processing disorder, in combination with their early childhood musical upbringing, they sometimes hear everyday sounds distorted as music. For example, they could interpret the sound of a passing garbage truck as a marching band. This phenomenon happens for Karen especially when they hear the sound of running water.
"You Are A Holy Earth Surface Walker"
2020
This work is a direct response to a prompt in Peggy Robles-Alvarado's class titled "Respite, Write, and Release™ for Women in Creative Rebellion." In one session, Peggy introduced the work of Pat McCabe, who is an indigonus person from the Dine tribe of the Navajo nation. Twenty percent of the lyrics to this musical composition was inspired directly from words that Pat McCabe's tribe leader passed down to his people. The rest was inspired by Karen's near death experiences.
For the purposes of this exhibition, masculinity is defined as a constructed and perceived set of traits as evaluated by a cis-dominated, colonized Western culture, in which masculinity is imposed from external perspectives, and translated into individual performances across the gender spectrum. BOY BOX optimistically proposes broader access to the joys and benefits of fluid, detachable masculine traits. The exhibition is not an astigmatic celebration of maleness, but rather a deconstruction of masculinity’s history of power, and a rejection of its stigma, one that has fueled racism and the marginalization of people who do not conform to binary constructions of gender. Addressing the hypocrisy of a masculine archetype that, in Western culture, is reserved for white cis-male people, this exhibition aims to complicate and bend masculinity across intersections of identity. To those ends, BOY BOX aims to carefully bring the fragility and preciousness of masculinity down to earth, catching it as it falls from its cultural pedestal. On view are artworks that address masculinity’s myriad iterations, frustrating ideas of gender, the male sex, and toxicity.
The United States’ surge of mass killings in recent years evinces the damage wrought by the Western tradition of violence as a masculine craft. Where research into the causes of mass violence is inadequate, an observable commonality is that most perpetrators are male-identifying. Meanwhile, modern sensibilities replace and flip archaic gender roles. Heterosexual romance, for example, is the old-fashioned process of quieting hyper-masculine impulse in order to sweeten and garner interest from a prospective sexual partner. This cloak to accessorize the performance of masculinity is a forefather of what we now call consent.
Working to move outside its conventional constraints, this exhibition offers a group of artists’ observations and performances of masculinity. Their work shows that we each have not only a unique relationship with the masculine, but a right to its power, swagger and strength.