Exhibitions
PARADISE
Stove Works / 1250 E 13th St. February 27 - June 6th (Reception: February 27 6:00pm - 8:00pm)
Hannah Banciella, E. Saffronia Downing, Nicholas V. Elbakidze, Aaron McIntosh, Jorge Palacios, Lyra Purugganan, Kit Rutter, Brian Smith, J. Sova, Lisa Waud, Yu Yan
“Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” - José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009)
Paradise asks: What is survival in a world with ever-ending apocalypses such as war, climate devastation, the stripping of human rights, and rampant capitalism? Specifically, how do those historically pushed to the margins build their own sense of paradise and worlds in order to survive, connect, and seek pleasure?
Co-curators Graham Feyl and J. Sova began to navigate these questions through the work of artist Derek Jarman (English, 1942-1994). Jarman’s fight with AIDS and the attention he gave to his garden outside his practice point to a nimble relationship of creation, destruction, and the liminality of the between. As writer Olivia Laing describes Jarman’s precarious state: “Would there be a future? Was the past irreparably destroyed? What to do? Don’t waste time. Plant rosemary, red-hot poker, santolina; alchemize terror into art.” Alchemizing terror into art is a central thread in the web of Paradise. The fifteen artists in the exhibition trouble and explore ways of survival, world-building, resistance, fostering relationships with the land, and community building.
Paradise proposes the idea of paradise not as a distant place, or a utopian future, but one that is unbounded temporally and has been built and rebuilt endlessly by those who have found themselves outside of normativity. We offer a queer reading of paradise that presents the idyllic as an endless possibility.
Image: Howard Sooley's photograph of Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage Gardens
