Curator Jon Davies developed this proposal during the Summer 2010 Curatorial Intensive in New York.
"What marks me generationally is that in those first years I was in New York—which were deep into the AIDS crisis—it wasn't my friends who were dying, it was the people I was just discovering, people I was just beginning to model myself after, people I longed to become." – Sharon Hayes
Coming After brings together a number of artists born in 1970 or later who share a certain contemporary queer sensibility that, whether explicitly or subconsciously, is in dialogue with the period of the late 1980s and early 1990s in North America that saw queer, art and other communities destroyed by AIDS and galvanized by AIDS activism. Featuring approximately ten artists primarily from North America, the exhibition will draw on work created in the last decade in a range of media and through diverse perspectives.
This exhibition identifies a renewed focus on the historical and the political as artists negotiate their hope and despair about our present moment in myriad ways. The seriousness of this sensibility—which can take decidedly un-serious forms—is reflected in the work’s oblique and complex presentation of the human body, in the evocation of spaces that are loaded with both historical resonance and future potential, and in nostalgic or melancholic tones. Rather than melding with the consumer-culture “liberation” that has been presented to the GLBT community as citizenship over the past fifteen years or so, the work evidences a sense of having come after or missed the dynamic watershed moment for queer art, community and activism that was the late ‘80s/early ‘90s—one rooted in trauma. These artists are arguably haunted by this moment, as if this historical period is unfinished—for some an open wound, for others a fount of inspiration. Whether mournful or celebratory, the work evidences a search for what was lost along the way from then to now.
Hayes’ quote speaks to how processes of becoming political and becoming an artist are compelled by specific historical positions, and how influence and affinity move forward and backward across time. These artists have a sense of themselves as part of queer genealogies and cultural lineages, and seem more interested in a dynamic play of absence and presence—the effects of bodies and atmospheres of spaces—than in identity.
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This exhibition is currently in development for The Power Plant in Toronto, Canada. Please contact curator Jon Davies at jdavies@thepowerplant.org with any questions about this exhibition, including the possibility of a tour. For further information about the Curatorial Intensive, please email info@curatorsintl.org.
