Queer Theory

Sculpture, video, and performance that queers US Southwest settler colonial history with plants and pilgrimages.

In Mark McKnight’s photographs, the material of the terrestrial world merges with a celestial aspect. Dark bodies, asphalt, oily birds, decomposing stone, and dimpled flesh all radiate from a field of tarry shadow.

The artist mines the visual languages of virtual reality, contemporary dance, music videos, ancient Roman architecture, and West African shrouding rituals to create a “weird, metastasized utopia” of digital social space.

On stage and in the studio, Kwak (aka Xina Xurner) summons bodies, objects, and energies that flourish at the “seams of the illusions of fixed identity.”

Future St. is set in an America in which homosexuality has triumphed over heterosexuality, cloning has replaced sexual reproduction, and California has seceded from the mainland United States to form the gay male state of “Clonifornia.”

The actors chat about performing masculinity, transitioning, and Blackwell’s one-person show They, Themself and Schmerm.

“Some people are happy calling me an artist, others a Conceptual or post-Conceptual artist, others say sculptor, and others use a string of modifiers. Someone suggested once that I was simply performing these categories, which I like.”

“I am an artist. I am a NEGROGOTHIC, devil-worshipping, free black man in the blues tradition. Those are the things I am now.”

“I don’t think being a cynical, academically oriented deconstructor should stop one from being a wild and crazy performer.”

In ECODEVIANCE, a ritualistic poetry book-cum-grimoire and guide to various livings and dyings, CAConrad’s mic is comprised of “the bones of the earth”: crystals. Voices whisper, ring, and shout through(out) this book.