Queer|Art|Film's Fall 2019 Season Announced At IFC Center

Queer|Art, New York City's home for the creative and professional development of LGBTQ+ artists, is pleased to announce a special Fall season of Queer|Art|Film at IFC Center (323 Sixth Avenue at West 3rd St.), September 16-December 2. Organized by guest curators Vivian Crockett, Camilo Godoy, and Carlos Motta-the season, titled Chicas y Fantasmas, explores the shells we inhabit to move through the world. Presented by four contemporary Latinx artists, the season assembles a fierce ensemble of showgirls, cyborgs, glam rockers, and two Chicana teens who defy gendered expectations, ableist norms, and society's limitations to actualize their own self-constructed identities and shape a vision of the world in which they want to live. A full itinerary follows. All screenings begin at 8pm.

Monday, September 16
Martine Gutierrez presents Showgirls
(Paul Verhoeven, 1995)

Nomi Malone is running from her past and chasing stardom as a showgirl in Las Vegas. She finds her way through "a tornado of thrusting and rhinestones" navigating the dance world's dark underbelly of misogyny and exploitation. Guest presenter and visual artist Martine Gutierrez describes this box-office-flop-turned-cult-classic as a "sexy, sexy mystery," oozing with campy excess and a glittery dash of film noir. A capital-d Diva armed in "Versayce," Nomi is aggressive in her sexuality, gender performativity, and ambition. Gutierrez reflects on how Nomi's dreams push her to obscene extremes, asking us to consider: Is it possible to over-realize a world?

About Martine Gutierrez
Martine Gutierrez received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012. The Brooklyn-based performance artist draws from eclectic media, acting as subject, artist, and muse, documenting her personal metamorphosis into various imagined roles. Interested in the fluidity of relationships and the role of genders within them, she employs mannequins as her counterparts to explore the diverse narratives of intimacy. Gutierrez is represented by Ryan Lee in New York City.

Monday, October 28
Elektra KB presents Ghost In The Shell
(Mamoru Oshii, 1996)

Major Motoko Kusanagi is a cyborg living in the fictional Japanese city of Niihama, circa 2029. As commander of a task force in search of hackers overtaking the cyberbrains of cyborg-human hybrids, she is made to confront her own identity and alienation. For video and performance artist Elektra KB, Ghost In The Shell presents "technological possibilities for some disabled humans, that, like me, fantasize often about getting a functional robot body." In Elektra's words, the film prompts us to "think of speculative trans-feminist technologies while showing elements of a radically tender, liberatory future in an AI cybernetic-dysphoria-hacking cyberpunk world."

About Elektra KB

Elektra KB is a Colombian artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her work addresses concerns such as migration and global power dynamics through a platform of mythology, coexisting with a documentarian and conceptualist approach. KB's work is currently featuring in "Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall" at the Brooklyn Museum, NY.

Monday, November 25
Ela Troyano presents Velvet Goldmine
(Todd Haynes, 1998)

Arthur Stuart is a British journalist writing an article about Brian Slade, a 1970s rock star who disappears from the spotlight after faking his own murder. As Stuart interviews people in Slade's past, the unfolding series of flashbacks reveals what really happened to the famed glam star. For interdisciplinary filmmaker Ela Troyano, Velvet Goldmine "queers pop music culture of the '70s and '80s-from its fairytale Oscar Wilde origin story to the raw musical performances by Ewan McGregor and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, inspired by the legendary sexual antics of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed."

About Ela Troyano
Ela Troyano is an interdisciplinary filmmaker, born in Cuba and based in New York City. Her projects bring together different aesthetic histories and genres: downtown New York avant-garde film and performance, queer cinema, Cuban-American cinema-in-exile and Latina film and video. Troyano's work explores the connections between performance and film through the lens of guerrilla practice: camouflage and insurrection conceptually shape both the form and content of her work.

Monday, December 2
Felipe Baeza presents Mosquita y Mari
(Aurora Guerrero, 2012)

Yolanda Olveros and Mari Rodriguez are high school classmates who discover they live in the same predominantly Mexican neighborhood in Los Angeles. The two teenagers forge a friendship while negotiating the expectations of their migrant parents. The intense social and personal pressures to belong bring them both intimately closer to one another. As visual artist Felipe Baeza, tonight's guest presenter, notes, "Mosquita y Mari is not your standard coming out story," but rather a layered meditation on migration, sexuality, and working-class family life, all themes that are near to Baeza's personal experience.

About Felipe Baeza

Born in Guanajuato, Mexico, Felipe Baeza incorporates painting and printmaking to examine how memory, migration, and displacement work to create a state of hybridity and fugitivity. Baeza's art practice aims to imagine structures and possibilities for the self-emancipation of the fugitive body that lives in and is persistently subjected to hostile conditions. He received a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union in 2009 and a M.F.A. from Yale University in 2018.

About our Guest Curators

Vivian Crockett is a New York-based, Brazilian-American independent researcher, scholar, and curator focusing largely on modern and contemporary art of African diasporas, (Afro)Latinx diasporas, and the Americas at the varied intersections of race, gender, and queer theory. She is a PhD candidate in art history at Columbia University whose dissertation examines artistic practices and discourses in Brazil in the sixties and seventies.

Camilo Godoy is an artist whose practice is concerned with the construction of political meanings and histories. His work engages with conceptual, photographic, and choreographic strategies to analyze and challenge past and present historical moments to imagine different subversive ways of being. He was born in Bogotá, Colombia and is based in New York, United States. His work has been presented in New York at the Brooklyn Museum, CUE, Danspace Project; and Mousonturm, Frankfurt; among others.

Carlos Motta's multi-disciplinary art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge dominant and normative discourses through visibility and self-representation. As a historian of untold narratives and an archivist of repressed histories, Motta is committed to in-depth research on the struggles of post-colonial subjects and societies. His work is in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum among many other institutional, corporate and private collections around the world.

Carlos Motta was Camilo Godoy's Mentor in the 2012-2013 cycle of the Queer|Art|Mentorship program.

About Queer|Art|Film

Presently celebrating its 10th consecutive year, this popular screening series, held monthly at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village, invites New York's most notable and influential LGBTQ+ artists to present and discuss films that have inspired them. Presented with generous support from HBO, the series has hosted over 100 screenings and reaces more than 1,500 viewers annually. Past presenters include: Anohni, Kate Bornstein, Douglas Crimp, Miguel Guitierrez, Juliana Huxtable, Wayne Kostenbaum, Larry Kramer, Lisa Kron, Kia LaBeija, Craig Lucas, Genesis P-Orridge, Dee Rees, and Flawless Sabrina. Curated by Adam Baran and Ira Sachs, with special guest season curators.

About Queer|Art

Queer|Art was born out of the recognition of a generation of artists and audiences lost to the ongoing AIDS Crisis, and in a profound understanding that one of the many repercussions of that loss has been a lack of mentors and role models for a new generation of LGBTQ+ artists. Founded in 2009 by filmmaker Ira Sachs, Queer|Art serves as a ballast against this loss and seeks to highlight and address a continuing fundamental lack of both economic and institutional support for LGBTQ+ artists. Our mission is to provide individuals within our community with the tools, resources, and guidance they need to achieve success and visibility for their work at the highest levels of their field.

The current programs of Queer|Art include: the year-long Queer|Art|Mentorship program; the long-running Queer|Art|Film series, held monthly at the IFC Center in lower Manhattan; and Queer|Art|Awards, an initiative of grants, prizes, and awards that provides various kinds of direct support-monetary and otherwise-to LGBTQ+ artists.

A list of the intergenerational community of artists supported and brought together by Queer|Art includes: Silas Howard, Jennie Livingston, Matt Wolf, Hilton Als, Sarah Schulman, Pamela Sneed, Justin Vivian Bond, Jibz Cameron, Trajal Harrell, John Kelly, Geoffrey Chadsey, Everett Quinton, Geo Wyeth, Angela Dufresne, Nicole Eisenman, Avram Finkelstein, Chitra Ganesh, Pati Hertling, Jonathan Katz, Tourmaline & Sasha Wortzel, Jess Barbagallo, Morgan Bassichis, Monstah Black, Yve Laris Cohen, Troy Michie, Tommy Pico, Justin Sayre, Colin Self, Jacolby Satterwhite, Rick Herron, and Hugh Ryan, among many others.

Website: www.queer-art.org

To post a comment, you must register and login.