Queer Tropics
Amanda Jirón-Murphy
Response > Washington, DC
May 1, 2018
“We are made of desire, and unexplainable pleasure”, a voice intones. This voice speaks to us in a language that we do not know:a form of indigenous language so unfamiliar that it seems lost to time. We are led through a jungle. Around us, the tropical foliage is so dense that it enshrouds us; we do not know where we came from, or where we are going. In the capable hands of artist Carlos Motta, we have been taken to the darkest regions of an unknown place where bodies, sounds, and voices have been rendered completely alien. We are in Queer Tropics.
To “queer” as a verb is an investigation into the potential multiplicity of meanings that a thing or subject may inherently possess. In the act of questioning something’s very foundations, limits and boundaries, a potential re-definition of the thing in question may emerge. Such is the case in Queer Tropics, the traveling exhibition hailing from Pelican Bomb’s Gallery X in New Orleans. The show, curated by Charlie Tatum and executive director Cameron Shaw, unpacks conventionally held notions of the “queer” and the “tropics” through a selection of works that reassess and overturn the terms by employing both familiar and foreign tropes;vivid neon colors, exotic foliage along with “foreign” bodies and allusions to the exotic siren song of heat, musk, and sex that the tropics once promised White European colonial settlers.
Installation View, Queer Tropics, Image courtesy Transformer
Madeline Galluci and Victoria Martinez generate the show’s initially festive atmosphere, enticing the viewer with bright, graphic, abstract patterned textiles that contrast with the gallery’s walls, which were painted Schiaparelli pink for the exhibition. It is Container #1, however, that signals the exhibition’s darker undertones. An image of an uncannily large body wrapped from head to toe in skin-tight foliage-printed fabric by artist Joiri Minaya, Container #1 is as seductive as it is disturbing. Presiding over the exhibition like a sinister Buddah, Minaya’s suffocated body demands a re-reading of every adjacent object, sign, form and decoration present in the exhibition. These works may look pretty, but like carnivorous plants, their seductive surfaces belie more complex motivations. In Queer Tropics, things are rarely what they seem.
Among the works on view in Queer Tropics, some yield playful, tongue-in-cheek surprises while others use their cheekiness and seductive surfaces as a foil for darker, more poignant content. Minaya’s Container #1 sits atop a pixelated banana-leaf wallpaper titled Redecode: a title theme is a great way to create a fresh, peaceful, relaxing atmosphere. The wallpaper, an adaptation of the Martinique Banana leaf pattern designed by Don Looper and popularized in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, is embedded with QR codes that, upon scanning, take viewers to online sites that often humorously illustrate the exoticization of the tropics by the upper class; a book available on Amazon, for example, that teaches Spanish that you can speak with your gardener, or websites that showcase white women modeling tropical-print fashions while reclining provocatively in woven wicker chairs. Adrienne Elise Tarver’s trio of fern-like collages Untitled, Siren 3 and Siren 1, meanwhile, reveal female forms nestled in whirls of emerald-green foliage, only visible upon close inspection. Conversely, the men in Pacifico Silano’s Plant Study No 1 confront the viewer with an aggressive sexuality that is diffused through a strategic cropping and overlapping images. We know we’re looking at gay male porn, but the most graphic bits have been withheld. It’s a tropical peepshow of sorts, but the joke is on us: we’re denied access.
Joiri Minaya, Redecode: a tropical theme is a great way to create a fresh, peaceful, relaxing atmosphere, Wallpaper, Dimensions variable, 2015 & Container #1, Pigment print, 60 x 40 inches, 2015. Image courtesy Transformer.
A trilogy of videos by Carlos Motta, meanwhile, are a slow burn. In Transformer’s iteration of the exhibition, these could be easily overlooked while in dialogue with their candy-colored competition. For those that will give them time, the videos are an emotionally cathartic experience that retell the searing and revelatory accounts of early encounters between indigenous societies and their Spanish and Portuguese colonists. Motta’s suite of videos unapologetically articulate some of the more serious themes present in Queer Tropics, namely that the subjugation of colonized people by their Christian suppressors is inextricably linked to our currently held definitions of “otherness” as they pertain to sex, gender and race.
Installation View, Queer Tropics, Image courtesy Transformer
Queer Tropics
March 10 – April 21, 2018
Transformer
Organized by Pelican Bomb
Ash Arder
Kerry Downey
Madeline Gallucci
Victoria Martinez
Joiri Minaya
Carlos Motta
Pacifico Silano
Adrienne Elise Tarver
Amanda Jirón-Murphy is the Gallery Director at Hamiltonian in Washington, DC, where she has directed over thirty exhibitions of contemporary art for an acclaimed international roster of mid- career and emerging artists since 2012. She holds a B.A. in Art History from John Cabot University in Rome, Italy (2003), and an M.A. in Modern and Contemporary Art and Connoisseurship from Christie's Education in London, England (2006), where she was the recipient of the Christie’s Alumni Award and the Robert Cummings Award. Following her studies she was awarded internships at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy and The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, where she subsequently worked for five years developing the museum's adult education programming.In addition to her work as a gallerist and artist's advocate, she has given presentations as a guest speaker at the Hirshhorn Museum, The Phillips Collection, Smithsonian's Luce Foundation for American Art and the National Museum of Women and the Arts. She lives and works in Washington, DC.
Transformer is a Washington, DC based 501 (c) 3 non-profit, artist-centered organization that connects and promotes emerging artists locally, nationally and internationally. Transformer's mission is to provide a consistent, supportive, and professional platform for emerging artists to explore and present experimental artistic concepts, build audiences for their work and advance their careers, while increasing dialogue, understanding, and audiences for contemporary visual arts.
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RESPONSE
A feature of project reviews experienced in person. Response will provide artists with much needed critical response to their work. Response is opinion-based but is not an op-ed.