CHICAGO — Cartoonist Rube Goldberg (1883–1970) was best known for his depictions of complicated contraptions with far too many moving parts built to solve the simplest of problems. These “Rube Goldberg machines” appeared in his work, and were used as devices to poke fun at the roundabout nature of American bureaucratic and political systems in the post-World [...]
With the gay marriage debates once again heating up in the United States and, of course, on Facebook, and actor Tilda Swinton’s sleeping in a glass box at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, now felt like the perfect time to revisit Canadian-Ukrainian artist Taras Polataiko’s Sleeping Beauty performance artwork, which went viral in the fall [...]
CHICAGO — Edie Fake is a radical punk queer feminist activist. He is currently “at large” in Chicago. Before that, he was driving around the country in a yellow school bus doing the gay performance “Fingers.” At the opening of his solo exhibition Memory Palaces at Thomas Robertello, he told me that he grew up somewhere outside of [...]
CHICAGO — The Great Refusal: Taking on New Queer Aesthetics induces a sort of lonely feel, one that falls closer in line with Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, which argues that “the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to embrace this refusal of the social and political order” than the [...]
CHICAGO — In the United States, the idea of a rural gay community may bring to mind snapshots from the 2006 documentary Small Town Gay Bar, which captures the goings-on of two gay bars in the rural Deep South. Historically, the gay bar has been a community gathering spot, a place where queers can socialize [...]
CHICAGO — Curator Danny Orendorff’s 19-artist exhibition All Good Things Become Wild and Free at Carthage College’s H.F. Johnson Gallery of Art located in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is a textually rich, difficult-to-describe arrangement. It is a forest plucked from the sewage system of Candyland-meets-Edward-Gorey’s-subconscious, populated by wild, overgrown glitter flowers, anus-like ruptures from neon-spray-painted, inflated, amorphous objects that [...]
Here’s a Katy Perry tribute story that I read at last month’s POP TRAUMA event. Please keep in mind that I squirted whipped cream from my crotch while reading this piece to an audience. Enjoy and please do your part to keep the pop trauma alive. A Portal into My Teenage Dream by Alicia Eler I [...]
CHICAGO — Fairytales are make-believe until a country’s Catholic Church decides to protest them. Ukranian-Canadian artist Taras Polataiko’s experimental performance work “Sleeping Beauty,” a modern-day retelling of the titular fairytale restaged at the National Museum of Art Ukraine from August 22 to September 9, has been decreed “lesbian propaganda” by the Ukrainian Catholic Church. The [...]
I’d cruise slick Chicago boy bodies at the infamous bathhouse Steamworks if I were a cisboy, or at least marginally passable as an effeminate dude. Suffice it to say that my gender isn’t welcome amidst the mist of those showers. My desire for dick instead led me to The Great Refusal: Taking on New Queer Aesthetics at [...]
I had the delightful pleasure of participating in Chicago-based artist Marie Walz’s live performance art piece, “Nick Rhodes/Outer Space/Waffle” (2011) at Food & Performance:Â A Showcase of Performance Art involving Edibles. Nick Rhodes/Outer Space/Waffle Red Velvet Waffles by Marie Walz performers: Alicia Eler, Gabe Sopocy, Lara Oppenheimer, Marie Walz, Megan Milks Artist Statement by Marie Walz [...]
CHICAGO — What does it mean, bodily, physically, emotionally, mentally, and perhaps spiritually, to be what Simone de Beauvoir deemed “the second … [Read More...]
Slipping the fur skin of a dead animal over a perfectly crafted taxidermy form produces a visual illusion of life, much in the tradition of a trompe … [Read More...]
Abigail DeVille ICEBERG PROJECTS 7714 N Sheridan Road April 13–June 1, 2013 If “X” marks the spot, and three Xs mean “poison, do not … [Read More...]
