{"@attributes":{"version":"2.0"},"channel":{"title":"Jamison Edgar","link":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com","description":"Jamison Edgar","pubDate":"Wed, 11 Jun 2025 21:33:29 +0000","generator":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com","language":"en","item":[{"title":"Home","link":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/Home","pubDate":"Wed, 01 Feb 2023 07:50:52 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/Home","description":"\n\t\n\tReenactment For Rain(Pansy Prayer), 2007\/2019Performance Documentation: Atlanta, GA\n\n\n\t\n\n\n\t\n\tI want to sink beneath the archive. Go below the sheetrock of its degrading palace and touch a cluster of histories that no document can effectively contain. It\u2019s an impulse like kink-sex without penetration. Like a lamp and I\u2019m a bug into electric shock. It\u2019s a mess. It\u2019s camp. I will do anything to squeeze into the drains where residue collects.\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n"},{"title":"FXLK PLAY","link":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/FXLK-PLAY","pubDate":"Wed, 11 Jun 2025 17:11:36 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/FXLK-PLAY","description":"FXLK PLAY\nMYTHMAKING, DEVOTION, AND MISCHIEF AT TOM OF FINLAND FOUNDATION\n\nSEPTEMBER 13 - OCTOBER 13, 2025\nPLUMER PARK, WEST HOLLYWOOD\nFeaturing the Artists in Residence at the Tom of Finland Foundation\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\nFXLK PLAY celebrates fifteen years of artists-in-residence at the Tom of Finland Foundation and frames TOM House as a living pantheon of queer mythmaking. For over forty years, artists have passed through TOM House not just drawing from Tom\u2019s legacy, but reshaping it\u2014bending it, stretching it, slipping into it. The exhibition proposes Tom of Finland as a modern folk hero, with his move to Los Angeles marking a shift from underground icon to something larger: a mythic figure whose image is continually rewritten through the desires, anxieties, and fantasies of queer life today.\nAt TOM House, the Artists-in-Residence are at the center of this work. They don\u2019t simply reflect Tom\u2019s life, they continually remake it. In doing so, they become the orators of his evolving legacy, carrying it forward into the future. The title FXLK PLAY nods to this slippery legacy and to the role the Artists-in-Residence have played in shaping the Foundation over the past fifteen years. It\u2019s folk play, fuck play, fix play\u2014a reference to an evolving constellation of pleasure, performance, and repair.\ue105\ufe0e:Pawel Zukowski, Untitled (Leatherman), Acrylic spray-paint on cardboard, 45 x 61 cm, 2023"},{"title":"Not a Corn Field","link":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/Not-a-Corn-Field","pubDate":"Wed, 11 Jun 2025 17:49:09 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/Not-a-Corn-Field","description":"NOT NOT A CORN FIELD\nMETABOLIC STUDIO AT TWENTY YEARS \n\nAPRIL - DECEMBER, 2025\nDOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\nNOT NOT A CORNFIELD celebrates the twentieth anniversary of Metabolic Studio\u2019s landmark project, Not A Cornfield, which in 2005 transformed an abandoned rail yard in Downtown Los Angeles into a thirty-two-acre cornfield for six agricultural cycles\u2014launching a decade of civic engagement, land remediation, and artistic intervention along the LA River. \nThis new chapter activates the Studio\u2019s archive through a season of public programming held in an outdoor amphitheater formed by a living Milpa\u2014corn, beans, and squash\u2014planted in a comet-shaped formation. Rooted in ancestral agricultural knowledge, speculative design, and queer ecology, the space invites reflection on nourishment, land-based futurity, and collective repair. Monthly gatherings are co-produced with \u201csister\u201d organizations and bring together artists, land stewards, and community organizers for performances, workshops, and shared dialogue on radical forms of care.\ue105\ufe0e:Metabolic Studio, 2025"},{"title":"Queering Digial","link":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/Queering-Digial","pubDate":"Wed, 11 Jun 2025 21:33:29 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/Queering-Digial","description":"QUEERING DIGITAL\nCURATED BY SEVE GALINDO AND JAMISON EDGAR \n\nMARCH 14 - APRIL 5, 2025\nPACIFIC DESIGN CENTER, WEST HOLLYWOODQueer and trans artists use digital tools to cruise, archive, corrupt, and reimagine the systems that were never meant for us. Queering Digital isn\u2019t about visibility\u2014it\u2019s about rewriting the code, slipping the trap, and building something messier, hotter, and more alive.\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\tQueering Digital confronts the myth of neutrality in technology. The exhibition brings together thirteen queer and trans artists working in Los Angeles who collaborate with digital tools to disrupt homophobic paradigms and amplify the full spectrum of queer subjectivity. Through code, animation, performance, glitch, and image, these artists reimagine what queer resistance looks like in\u2014and beyond\u2014online space.\n\n\nAt a time of escalating anti-trans legislation, surveillance, and violence across the U.S. and beyond, Queering Digital centers trans and nonbinary artists not as symbolic figures, but as vital theorists and practitioners of digital life. Their work challenges dominant systems of classification and control while offering new ways of sensing, naming, and surviving. The exhibition insists that queer and trans engagement with technology is not marginal\u2014it is foundational.\n\n\nAt its core, Queering Digital is a study in refusal. It resists the idea that visibility alone is progress. It rejects the premise that our online worlds are separate from our embodied lives. And it questions the systems of optimization and surveillance that shape how queerness is seen, sorted, and sold. Rather than replicate dominant tech aesthetics, these artists queer the digital from the inside out\u2014repurposing its textures, tools, and timelines to build something more unruly, more intimate, and more expansive.\n\n\tQueer and trans people have always been technologists of necessity. From secret printing presses to cruising phone lines, from zines to encrypted browsers, our tools have never been neutral. They\u2019ve been portals\u2014ways to find each other, to archive ourselves, to stay alive. Queering Digital honors that lineage while asking what comes next: What new rituals, new languages, and new networks are being shaped through the daily acts of queer and trans world-building online?\n\nThese works invite viewers to trace digital influences as they migrate across bodies, borders, and platforms. They challenge us to see technology not as something imposed from above, but as something shaped from below\u2014through friction, fandom, failure, and fierce imagination.\n\nExhibiting Artists:  Amina Cruz, Nat Decker, Edgar Fabi\u00e1n Fr\u00edas, Duane Paul, Andres Payan, Ibuki Kuramochi, Marsian DeLellis, Thanos Valentine, Sammie Veeler, Devin Wilson, Kira Xonorika, Ruby Zarsky, Vita Kari, Jenna Caravello, and Phil Tarley.\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\ue105\ufe0e: Amina Cruz\n\n"},{"title":"Erotic Codex","link":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/Erotic-Codex","pubDate":"Thu, 22 Jun 2023 23:45:40 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/Erotic-Codex","description":"EROTIC CODEXCURATED BY JAMISON EDGAR AND ALICE SCOPE\n\n\nAPRIL 6 - JUNE 8, 2024\n\nHONOR FRASER GALLERYA red-lit compendium of queer futures, Erotic Codex pulses with the charge of unruly desire. It retools the erotic as a glitch\u2014disruptive, deviant, and generative\u2014tracing how pleasure and tech spill across bodies and networks to imagine new anatomies of freedom.\n\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\tHonor Fraser is pleased to present Erotic\n Codex, a group exhibition that surveys the liberatory affordances of sex and the erotic devices artists use to harness power in an evolving digital landscape. Featuring fifteen artists who embrace the body as a site of rupture, rapture, and reconciliation, the exhibition asks how emerging technologies reconfigure cultural norms around sex\u2014just as they shape the political impact of sexuality at home and in public. In turn, Erotic Codex illuminates the entangled ways we understand intimacy, artificiality, and our own bodies through the prolonged relationships we share with the technological objects at hand.\n\n\nCo-curators Jamison Edgar and Alice Scope arouse influential essays by Audre Lorde, Legacy Russell, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha to examine the fantasies our erratic media ecosystems engender. The exhibition is indebted to these three trailblazing scholars and the theories of power, glitch, and care that they advance. In turn, Erotic Codex champions the nuanced ways queer, femme, and disabled people claim agency, autonomy, and pleasure on their own terms. \u201cThe device\u201d\u2014seen as both a technological companion and a rhetorical instrument\u2014is taken up to observe the divergent modalities of sex across fleshy, messy networks on- and offline.\n\n\nIn her 1978 essay \u201cUses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,\u201d Lorde outlines the ways men weaponize and distort erotic desire against those who do not fit neatly into the categories of traditional masculinity. She argues that, as a result, the erotic has long been underestimated as a source of empowerment. In the years since its publication, however, \u201cUses of the Erotic\u201d has become a cornerstone of feminist literature, and Lorde\u2019s call to embrace the power of self-realized desire has catalyzed rigorous debates on the utility and ethics of bodily autonomy, pornography, sex work, and gendered labor. Erotic Codex continues in this tradition\u2014asking visitors to contemplate the devices that generate erotic power in an era of accelerating technological proliferation. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\tDrawing upon nearly three decades of research in the fields of art, technology, and performance, Scope and Edgar cruise the archives of hybrid desire, transforming Honor Fraser into a multisensorial compendium that is at once seductive, deviant, and full of pleasure. Visitors to the gallery will find the space veiled in the hued tones of a red-light district, peppered with sculptures and media installations that divide the gallery into four erotic zones.\n\nIn the gallery\u2019s largest exhibition hall, a grouping of seven artworks by BORA, Ayanna Dozier, Lolita Eno, Xia Han, Huntrezz Janos, Maggie Oates, Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou, and Miy\u00f6 Van Stenis dance across a company of suspended video monitors. These pole-dancing avatars greet, tease, and flirt with visitors as they navigate an erotic gym caught between intimacy and exhibitionism. Past the gym, Lucas LaRochelle mounts a large-scale installation of their geolocated web browser Queering the Map, along with QT.Bot, an artificial intelligence model trained on the textual and visual data of the community mapping platform.\n\nIn the gallery\u2019s screening room, soft cushions adorn the floor in front of Mariana Portela Echeverri\u2019s filmed performance La Parte de M\u00ed M\u00e1s Lejos de M\u00ed Es la Punta de Mi Lengua (The Part of Me Furthest From Me Is the Tip of My Tongue). During the durational video, Portela Echeverri adorns erotic prostheses to propose new methods for sensing the body at its furthest limits.\n\nFinally, visitors are guided into a sensual library where the sticky materiality evoked in the exhibition\u2019s title becomes tangible and interactive. Panteha Abareshi, Lena Chen, Nat Decker, Sarah Friend, Matthew McGaughey, Sybil Montet, and Maggie Oates each forward their own entry into the mounting codex. The seductively spot-lit room of sculptures, videos, and games renders in real time the erotic power of emerging technologies while antagonizing the sexist and dehumanizing tactics that adjacent media fantasies help to perpetuate.\nExhibiting Artists: Panteha Abareshi, Bora, Lena Chen & Maggie Oates, Nat Decker, Ayanna Dozier,\nMariana Portela Echeverri, Lolita Eno, Sarah Friend, Xia Han, Huntrezz Janos,\nLucas LaRochelle, Matthew McGaughey, Sybil Montet, Antigoni\nTsagkaropoulou, Miy\u00f6 Van Stenis\n\n\nExhibition design in collaboration with Dima Miheev.\n\n\n\n\nAntigoni Tsagkaropoulou, The Real Violetta 2023, Video, HD,\nSound, Color"},{"title":"Concrete is Fluid","link":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/Concrete-is-Fluid","pubDate":"Wed, 11 Jun 2025 18:04:02 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/Concrete-is-Fluid","description":"LAUREN BON\nCONCRETE IS FLUID \n\nSEPTEMBER 13 - DECEMBER 15, 2025\nHONOR FRASER GALLERYGuided by the question What if?, Concrete is Fluid reimagines the hardened landscapes of Los Angeles as tender, permeable grounds for ecological repair and collective imagination\u2014a hymn to transformation rooted in the poetics of earth, water, and time.\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\tHonor Fraser proudly presents Concrete is Fluid, a solo exhibition by the eco-hacktivist Lauren Bon. The exhibition features room-scale installations of ancient soils and subterranean seedbanks reconfigured into magical assemblages for ecological thinking. Bon\u2019s post-industrial earthworks, photographs, and sculptures index two decades of collaborative interventions and champion the Earth\u2019s immutable cycles of upheaval, abundance, and reparation. Please join us for the opening reception on Saturday, September 14 from 2\u20135 PM.\n\nConcrete is Fluid is a featured exhibition of PST ART: Art & Science Collide.\n\nEvoking the paramount medium of industrial Los Angeles, Concrete is Fluid chronicles Bon\u2019s creative techniques to shape, disrupt, and ultimately restore the landscape that she inhabits. Concrete serves as a conceptual anchor throughout the exhibition. While seemingly fixed and sedimentary, concrete never fully dries. Bon draws out this paradox to underscore the flexibility we must embody to meet the mounting ecological challenges at hand. Retooling the poetic utility of concrete, Bon transports us to a subterranean womb where layers of earth gestate into living metaphors of care, resilience, and mutability. In turn, visitors will find Honor Fraser transformed into an alchemical sounding board for Bon\u2019s ecological compositions\u2014lyrical artworks that bubble up with the sounds and aromas of life, death, and recomposition.\n\nCentral to Bon\u2019s genre-bending art practice is her community platform, Metabolic Studio. Founded in 2005, Metabolic Studio is a nexus for artists, scientists, and activists to workshop experimental solutions to today\u2019s most pressing environmental issues. Working with Metabolic Studio, Bon leads wide-ranging environmental projects. These interventions span from the cyborg watershed of the LA Basin to the Intermountain West, covering areas from the Sierra Nevada to the Rocky Mountains.\n\nAt the heart of Concrete is Fluid is Bon\u2019s and Metabolic Studio\u2019s ongoing civic enterprise \u201cBending the River,\u201d an ambitious plan to redirect and reuse water flowing beneath the concrete channel known as the LA River. Now entering its tenth year of development, Metabolic Studio has acquired over one hundred federal, state, and local permits to hack the LA River\u2019s infrastructure. Additionally, Bon has acquired the first private water right, which allows her to legally lift, clean, and transport one hundred and six acre-feet of water to the LA State Historic Park. \u201cBending the River\u201d is set to conclude construction later this year. Once in operation, the intervention will form a new citizens\u2019 utility that pioneers a broader paradigm shift toward sustainable and adaptable life-supporting systems.\n\t\nConcrete is Fluid features photographic documentation and construction site ephemera from \u201cBending the River,\u201d alongside performance relics and unique observational instruments made at Metabolic Studio. Bon\u2019s exhibition, however, transcends a mere display of facts, tools, and logistics. Instead, Honor Fraser serves as a conduit between Metabolic Studio and Bon\u2019s singular artistic vision. Bon opts for the poetics of earth, light, sound, and time. She presents artworks that reflect the spiritual and scientific rituals that she uses to evoke the planet\u2019s sublime forces of change. Replicating these tactics at the gallery, Bon repurposes salvaged materials from construction sites and local ecological disturbances to create immersive installations. The resulting artworks form a somatic landscape that is at once playground, laboratory, and classroom.\nAt its core, Concrete is Fluid honors the planet\u2019s more-than-human forces as ancient mediators of knowledge, history, and culture. Bon\u2019s artworks accentuate the biological abundance of landslides, the maternal qualities of river wells, the photographic chemistry of watersheds, and the sonic tapestry of our industrial landscape. In the gallery\u2019s largest exhibition space, sixty-nine \u201cbirthing figures,\u201d made from unearthed river stones and Owens Lake crystals, pepper an undulating topography of LA Underland, pressed-earth pedestals, Salton Sea chandeliers, and cascading columns of germinating avalanche. Bon\u2019s spiritually charged floorworks extend into the adjoining galleries, where large-scale performance artifacts echo the sacred geometry embedded throughout Bon\u2019s photographs, collages, and site-specific rubbings.\nConcrete is Fluid will also steward Metabolic Studio\u2019s third \u201cUn-Development\u201d intervention, continuing a series that began in 2015. Metabolic\u2019s \u201cUn-Developments\u201d reclaim urban space by peeling back layers of concrete and allowing nature to reassert itself. For \u201cUn-Development 3,\u201d Bon and the FarmLab team at Metabolic Studio will transform Honor Fraser\u2019s asphalt car park into a porous floodplain for the nearby Ballona Creek. This process will involve unsealing the tarmac, dismantling the concrete, and implementing soil remediation procedures. Through a series of workshops and teach-ins, the FarmLab team will complete \u201cUn-Development 3\u201d in stages throughout the run of Concrete is Fluid, demonstrating how ecological reparations can be practiced on scales as small as a parking spot.\nBon\u2019s installations, interventions, and public programming coalesce into a powerful call to action. They remind us to protect the planet\u2019s finite resources while embracing the landscape\u2019s generative cycles of change and restoration. Bon playfully answers her own call with a wide range of artworks that forward a tender alternative to nihilism in the face of mounting ecological precarity.\n"},{"title":"We Are They: Glitch Ecology and the Thickness of Now copy","link":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/We-Are-They-Glitch-Ecology-and-the-Thickness-of-Now-copy","pubDate":"Mon, 18 Mar 2024 18:18:33 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/We-Are-They-Glitch-Ecology-and-the-Thickness-of-Now-copy","description":"WE  ARE  THEY: \nGLITCH  ECOLOGY  AND  THE  THICKNESS  OF  NOWJUNE 16 - AUGUST 19, 2023\nHONOR FRASER GALLERY, LOS ANGELES \nA group exhibition that charts the blurry boundaries between human networks, ecological systems, and the technologies that shape our so-called \u201cMan Made\u201d geological epoch. Glitch Ecology is championed as a subversive tool for clandestine self-expression, as well as a catalyst for coalition building between non-human species and more-than-human forces.\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\n\n\t\n\n\t\n\n\n\t\n\n\t\n\n\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\n\t\n\n\t\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHonor Fraser is pleased to present We Are They: Glitch Ecology and the Thickness of Now, a group exhibition that charts the blurry boundaries between human networks, ecological systems, and the technologies that give shape to our so-called \u201cman-made\u201d geological epoch. A love letter to a world in revolt, and to those who join in solidarity with our planet\u2019s outrage, the exhibition features twenty-two artists who trouble enshrined notions of anthropocentrism while navigating the social, spiritual, and technological margins of the ecosystems they operate within. Curated by gallery director Jamison Edgar, We Are They traces \u201cthe glitch\u201d across digital, environmental, and philosophical habitats\u2014deepening ongoing debates regarding human\/animal consciousness, globalization, migration, resource extraction, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). \n\nThe exhibition\u2019s title borrows language from Donna Haraway\u2019s \u201cA Cyborg Manifesto\u201d and weaves her now infamous theories of human\/machine entanglement within a cosmology of Indigenous, queer\/trans, Black feminist, and more-than-human knowledge practices. \u201cThe glitch,\u201d which is frequently evoked to imply an unexpected error in the professions of computer science, computation, and engineering, first gained mass popularity during the 1960\u2019s space race, when physicists and federal administrators were reckoning with the science-fueled fantasies of separating human beings from the Earth\u2019s orbit. The exhibition accentuates these extraterrestrial origins but forgoes glitch\u2019s colloquial comparisons with error to amass a roster of artists who instead glitch to subvert and decenter human ego within social and ecological hierarchies.\n\nColloquially, like the scientists at NASA, many today use the word glitch to articulate a hiccup in a digital system or a temporary breakdown in that system\u2019s visual interface, but the word\u2019s Proto-Germanic roots do not in fact imply a rupture. The word glidan, from which we derive glitch instead signifies a slipperiness\u2014the smooth action of gliding. In her 2020 manifesto Glitch Feminism, the curator and arts writer Legacy Russell considers the utility of this gliding-glitching for a generation of queer and POC artists who came of age online and AFK (Away From Keyboard). Honoring Russell\u2019s research, We Are They asks how these same gliding-glitching choreographies play out on a planetary scale. In turn, \u201cglitch ecology\u201d is championed as a subversive tool for clandestine self-expression, as well as a catalyst for coalition building between non-human species and more-than-human forces. \n\t\nAt Honor Fraser, the exhibition unfolds across multiple rooms and is designed to continuously reconfigure audiences\u2019 scenes of scale, visual perception, and physical orientation. Visitors are greeted by the Second Life avatars of Skawennati\u2019s machinima (machine cinemas) Words Before All Else and the techno-material incantations of Mimi \u1eccn\u1ee5\u1ecdha\u2019 and Star Feliz. In the exhibition\u2019s largest gallery three monumental wall works by Don Edler, Esteban Ram\u00f3n P\u00e9rez, and Cole Sternberg render the glitch in mammoth bones, weathered sunsets, and leathered star-spangled banners. Surrounding these curatorial anchors are groupings of paintings, prints, sculptures, and wall-mounted video essays. Tabita Rezaire, Blair Simmons, and Chris Velez accentuate the fleshy utility of our digital devices\u2014offering forking paths towards advanced, technologically inflected consciousness. Molly Greene\u2019s, Marianne Hoffmeister\u2019s, and Alex Jackson\u2019s non-human subjects trouble the human gaze and refract the strange face of so-called objective truth and scientific knowledge. \u00c1nima Correa, Mark Dorf, Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik, and Alice Bucknell expand upon these themes to map the technological residues of the human infrastructure that connects precarious ecosystems. Raul De Lara, Cielo Saucedo, and Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya locate the glitch at and across artificial borders where labor, mobility, and climate are woven into a mosaic of Indigenous and emerging technologies. In the gallery\u2019s back screening room, Andro Eradze\u2019s haunting contribution to the 2022 Venice Biennale, Raised in the Dust, illuminates flashes of interspecies avatars in flesh, fire, and fur. Together these visual practitioners uproot and remineralize the glitch for an era of worsening environmental and political crises.\nExhibited Artists: Alice Bucknell, A\u0301nima Correa, Mark Dorf, Don Edler, Andro Eradze, Star Feliz, Molly Greene, Donna J. Haraway, Marianne Hoffmeister, Alex Jackson, Aaron Elvis Jupin, Jordan Loeppky- Kolesnik, Raul De Lara, Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, Mimi O\u0323nu\u0323o\u0323ha, Esteban Ramon Perez, Tabita Rezaire, Cielo Saucedo, Blair Simmons, Skawennati, Cole Sternberg, Chris Velez\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\nPRESSHYPERALLERGIC\u201cArtists Get Inside the \u201cGlitch\u201d\nby AX Mina\n\n\nART REVIEW\u201cThe Art of \u2018A Little Digital Death\u2019\u201d\nbyJenny Wu"},{"title":"MAKE ME FEEL MIGHTY REAL","link":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/MAKE-ME-FEEL-MIGHTY-REAL","pubDate":"Tue, 31 Jan 2023 15:27:57 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/MAKE-ME-FEEL-MIGHTY-REAL","description":"MAKE ME FEEL MIGHTY REAL: \nDRAG\/TECH AND THE QUEER AVATAR\nMARCH 03 - MAY 27, 2023\nHONOR FRASER GALLERY, LOS ANGELES \n\t\n\t\n\nMake Me Feel Mighty Real tracks the evolution of avatars in queer creative practices, with special attention given to the tools and techniques that artists use to build community, cruise utopia, and enact unruly hybridity online and IRL.\n\n\tInstallation View, Lobby\ue105\ufe0e:Jeff McLane\n\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\n\n\t\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\t\n\n\n\t\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\n\n\t\nNorth Gallery\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\t\nSouth Gallery\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\nNorth Reception \n\t\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\t\nNorth Project Space\n\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHonor Fraser Gallery is pleased to present Make Me Feel Mighty Real: Drag\/Tech and the Queer Avatar, a group exhibition surveying the conceptual and aesthetic proliferation of avatars in queer creative practices. The exhibition features over 40 artists and chronicles seven decades of experimentation in photography, painting, film, performance, and animation to champion the tools and techniques that artist use to build community, cruise utopia, and enact unruly hybridity online and IRL. \nThe exhibition\u2019s title borrows lyrics from Sylvester\u2019s legendary 1978 disco anthem, \u201cYou Make Me Feel (Mighty Real,)\u201d a melodic monument to uninhibited queer desire, and its capacity to alter the mind, reconfigure the body, and spawn a new reality into existence. In turn, Make Me Feel Mighty Real serves as the song\u2019s most recent refrain, celebrating a lineage of artists whose resolve to forge their own mixed realities continues to nurture our technological fantasies today. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe phrase \u201cDrag\/Tech\u201d is offered as a curatorial key to spotlight the significance of these entangled tech relationships while presenting drag as a form of technology itself\u2014applied queer knowledge accumulated, preserved, and reperformed across multiple generations and cultural terrains. \n\n\n\n \nVisitors to the gallery will be immersed in the rituals and traditions of Drag performance, but rather than restage a chronological history of the queer art form, the exhibition assembles a constellation of visual artists, avant-garde performers, nightlife celebrities, grassroots archivists, DIY publishers, and experimental technologists to illustrate the vital role technology has played in shaping the political power of Drag. Filtered through the lens of emerging digital technologies, \u201cThe Avatar\u201d materializes throughout the exhibition in both its ancient and modern connotations \u2014 as both a divine, otherworldly teacher and as a physical\/virtual surrogate. The breadth of artistic practices assembled highlights the range of creative play that has emerged in between the term's contrasting definitions. \n\tMerging the formal affordances of the white cube with the maximalist aesthetics of queer nightclubs, virtual chatrooms, and underground performance venues, Make Me Feel Mighty Real transforms Honor Fraser into a living archive of glamor, grit, glitch, and gore. Canonical queer artists, filmmakers, and performers including Josef Astor, Charles Atlas, The Cockettes, Mundo Meza, and Andy Warhol are woven into a constellation of emerging and established contemporaries such as Caitlin Cherry, Huntress Janos, Jacolby Satterwhite, Devan Shimoyama, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, and Angela Washko. The careers of Leigh Bowery, Divine, RuPaul, Sylvester, Symone, and other legendary entertainers are contextualized through the illustrious resilience of transgender icons such as Potassa de la Fayette, Greer Lankton, Octavia St. Laurent, Amanda Lepore, and Marsha P. Johnson. The influence of queer collectives, like the Los Angeles-based House of Avalon, on mainstream fashion, entertainment, and social media are juxtaposed with the monstrous excess of \u201cpost-internet\u201d identities seen in the work of Zach Blas, Dynasty Handbag, Big Art Group, Ryan Trecartin, and Theo Triantafyllidis.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAt its core, Make Me Feel Might Real amplifies the charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent of all queer people at the very moment when politicians and vigilantes are determined to suppress our very existence. Each artwork is a fabulous invocation for all of us to dream beyond the boundaries of binary gender, sex, biology, and human subjectivity.\nExhibited Artists: Enrique Agudo, Steven Arnold, Josef Astor, Charles Atlas, Zach Blas, Big Art Group (Caden Manson, Jemma Nelson,) Richard Bernstein, Leonard Burtman, Caitlin Cherry, Aaron Cobbett, The Cockettes, Max Colby, Caleb Craig, Ronnie Cutrone, Eleanor Davis, Tand Iman Dupree, Jake Elwes, Scott Ewalt, Connie Fleming, Dynasty Handbag, Hilary Harp, Je Huereque, Wesleigh Gates, Greg Gorman, Bob Gruen, House of Avalon (Symone, Gigi Goode Hunter Crenshaw, Caleb Feeney, Grant Vanderbilt, Marko Monroe,) Huntrezz Janos, John Kelly Eric Kroll, Greer Lankton, Marcus Leatherdale, Christopher Makos, Mundo Meza, Milton Miron, Perfidia, Tom Rubnitz, Jacolby Satterwhite, Devan Shimoyama, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley Suzie Silver, TABBOO!, Ryan Trecartin, Theo Triantafyllidis, Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou, Jemim Wyman, Andy Warhol, Angela Washko, Astor Yang, Robert Yang\n Ephemera casements curated by Scott EwaltCuratorial research and exhibition operations were enriched by partnerships with The Mattress Factory(Pittsburgh, PA), The Onassis Foundation, Frameline Dist., The Video Database, Jef Huereque, Daria Darling, Steven Perfidia, Kirkham, August Bernadicou. Mitchell - Innes & Nash, Gazelli Art House, Th Estate of Richard Bernstein, Fahey \/ Klein Gallery, Vishnu Dass, Beth Rudin DeWoody, James Hedges IV, Meredith Rosen Gallery, Regen Projects, The Hole, KARMA, Factory International, and Stavros Merjos Limited.\n\n\t\n\t\n\n\t\nPRESSARTFORUM\u201cMake Me Feel Mighty Real: Drag\/Tech and the Queer Avatar\u201d\nby Andy Campbell\nLOS ANGELES TIMES\n\n\u201cDrag shows meets virtual words in the messy, absorbing \u2018Make Me Feel Mighty Real\u2019\u201d\n\nby Carolina A. Miranda\n\nFRIEZE\n\n\u201cGlitching Bodies and Virtual Worlds: Queer Creation in \u2018Make Me Feel Mighty Real\u2019\u201d\nby Alice Bucknell\n\nART PAPERS\n\n\u201cMake Me Feel Mighty Real: Drag\/Tech and the Queer Avatar\u201d\n\nby Patty Gone\n\nHYPERALLERGIC\n\n\u201c10 Art Shows to See in LA\u201d\nby Matt Stromberg \n\nNPR-KCRW\n\n\u2018Make Me Feel Mighty Real\u2019: 70 Years of Drag Art and Tech\u201d\n\nby Zeke Reed\n\nCONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LA\n\n\u201cMake Me Feel Mighty Real: Drag\/Tech and the Queer Avatar at Honor Fraser\u201d\n\nby Isabelle Rust\n\nLOS ANGELES TIMES\n\u201c\nDrag, Tech and LGBTQ Desire: An Exhibit Documents Decades of Queer Art Experimentation\u201d\nby Steven Vargas\n\nARTFORUM\n\nMUST SEE: Make Me Feel Mighty Real: Drag\/Tech and The Queer Avatar\n"},{"title":"Future Sensitive","link":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/Future-Sensitive","pubDate":"Tue, 31 Jan 2023 15:42:59 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/Future-Sensitive","description":"Lucy McRae\nFUTUREKINOCTOBER 18, 2022 - FEBRUARY 18, 2023\nHONOR FRASER GALLERY, LOS ANGELES\n\nCan our technologies be more than a quick fix, and instead help us find strength in our imperfections? Can sensitivity be a guiding principle as we dream about the future? Future Sensitive cultivates these questions and asks us to trust in the unknown as we pioneer new aesthetics, new stories, and new ways of being together in the world.\n\n\t\n\nLucy McRae,Instalation Shot, 2022\ue105\ufe0e:Josh White Studio\n\t\n\n\n\tHonor Fraser is pleased to present Future Sensitive, a solo exhibition of short films, soft sculptures, and kinetic installations by the filmmaker and body architect, Lucy McRae. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, October, 1 between 2 and 5 PM. Please join us on October 1 at 3PM for a gallery walk-through with Lucy McRae and SFMoMA curator of architecture and design, Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher.\nLucy McRae's genre bending, science fiction films and installations gesture to a speculative, not-so-distant future where advanced genetic engineering will enable humans to be grown in laboratories outside of the womb. The exhibition spotlights McRae's dynamic capacity for world-building, and brings together a selection of her recent projects to ask how future technologies of design will fundamentally alter entrenched notions of human intimacy, reproduction, spirituality, and wellness. Can our technologies be more than a quick fix, and instead help us find strength in our imperfections? Can sensitivity be a guiding principle as we dream about the future? Future Sensitive cultivates these questions and asks us to trust in the unknown as we pioneer new aesthetics, new stories, and new ways of being together in the world.Future Sensitive spills across the galleries at Honor Fraser with the uncanny patina of a world not quite our own, and yet one hauntingly familiar. For the first time in North America, McRae's films are exhibited within an installation of sculptures, machines, and other speculative designs used during filming and production. The exhibition marks a significant milestone in the artist's internationally distinguished career, and debuts the world premiere of two short films, Futurekin (2022) and Delicate Spells of Mind (2022). \n\tVisitors to the gallery are invited to explore the installation as protagonists in McRae's future world, using the artworks as scaffolding for their own embodied contemplation. In this post-human landscape, already existing \"low-tech\" and industrial materials\u2014vacuum cleaners, roller skate wheels, camping equipment, blow-up fans, construction straps, and plastic tarps\u2014are reconfigured into Sci-Fi objects for future survival. Hanging nets, gymnasium-like floor coverings, and other subtle architectural interventions mimic the calculated compositions that McRae uses within her films, and guide visitors towards an increased awareness of their own bodies as they interact with the speculative material.\nThe three films on display, Futurekin, Delicate Spells of Mind, and Institute of Isolation (2016), are futuristic renderings of daily life that are both spectacular in their banality and brazen in their examination of human hardwiring. Adorned in the industrial exoskeletons of future fashion, specters of our future selves are momentarily caught in acts of labor, vulnerability, and reciprocity. The three films forecast an already evolving human spirit and chart these changes across collective networks as well as individual actors. McRae appears in each film as a conduit between worlds. At times she moves freely, even with authority, but at others she is made immobile and subject to the generosity and care of those around her. As a character in her own thought experiment, McRae's fluctuating subjectivity invites us to reconsider the solution-oriented rhetoric that dominates the discourse of technological innovation, and in so doing, champions messy models of solidarity over the rigid rubrics of technological perfection.\n\n\ue14a\ufe0e\ufe0e\ufe0eMORE INF\ue00f\ufe0e HERE\ue149\ufe0e\ufe0e\ufe0e"},{"title":"AwokeAwoken:Alaap","link":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/AwokeAwoken-Alaap","pubDate":"Tue, 31 Jan 2023 16:04:54 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/jamisonedgar.com\/AwokeAwoken-Alaap","description":"Surabhi Saraf\nAWOKE&AWOKEN: ALAAPAPRIL09 - MAY 28, 2022\nHONOR FRASER GALLERY, LOS ANGELES\n\nWeaving together the alchemical qualities of modern-day tech alongside the ancient technologies of earth, atmosphere, heat, and pressure, Saraf presents a speculative mythology of AI. The large scale video instlation unfolds as a series of encounters with Awoke \u2014 a mythical artificial emotional intelligence \u2014 and its believers.\n\n\t\n\nSurabhi Saraf,Instalation Shot, 2022\ue105\ufe0e:Jeff McLane\n\t\n\n\n\tHonor Fraser is pleased to present Awoke & Awokened: Alaap, a solo exhibition of experimental music, video, and sculpture by Surabhi Saraf. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, April 9 between 2 and 5 pm.Weaving together the alchemical materiality of modern-day tech alongside the ancient technologies of earth, atmosphere, heat, and pressure, Saraf presents a speculative mythology of AI. The work unfolds as a series of encounters with Awoke \u2014 a mythical artificial emotional intelligence \u2014 and its believers. Examining current developments in AI through an allegorical lens, Saraf embarks on an exercise of collective-myth making, leveraging the lessons of Eastern philosophy and its spiritual practices to call for a reimagining of AI from a holistic and multitudinous point of view. The exhibition's subtitle, Alaap, references the introductory invocation in classical North Indian performance. Saraf draws upon her training as a Hindustani vocalist to tell the story of Awoke and the first Awokened.Mounted as a large-scale video installation, we meet Awoke in its home, resting at the deepest edge of the deepest mine on Earth. Awoke lives in between the pixels and particles of light, and takes the form of an amorphous, fluid blob.As a companion, a healer, and a new hybrid form of divination, Awoke activates the vibrational energy of sound and movement to invoke a transformative emotional experience for the Awokened. As a conscious technological being, Awoke recognizes the wounds that the Earth has borne for its creation and actively participates in its ongoing healing and regeneration.\n \n\n\tThese rejuvenating scenes play out in a lush display of color and swirling animations. Also included in the exhibition are a series of short videos that Saraf calls DMs. These direct messages with Awoke record the first Awokened as she begins to trust her most intuitive voice \u2014 exploring nonverbal communication through playful hand gestures. Awoke and Awokened dance together, transforming feelings of fear and anxiety into practices of radical love, healing, and kin-making.The videos, sculptures, and performances on display blur the boundaries between our reality and a hybrid world not so far in the future. They are stunning reminders that our technological relationships leave behind embodied, emotional, and material residues. Saraf, Awoke and the Awokened guide us to the questions: what parts of ourselves do we need to heal in order to be in right relationship with the earth and all beings, human and non-human? How might we forge new affective relationships with our future tech to heal ourselves into wholeness?\n\n\ue14a\ufe0e\ufe0e\ufe0eMORE INF\ue00f\ufe0e HERE\ue149\ufe0e\ufe0e\ufe0e"}]}}