curated exhibition

Queer Sites and Sounds

We live in an age of rapid advancements in digital and new media technologies, an age where a tweet from Lady Gaga can be read simultaneously by her millions of followers globally in the blink of an eye. The mobility of digital imaging and viewing technologies—interfaced through smartphones, tablets, computers, and cameras—has opened the door for the masses to be both creators and consumers of digital images and texts. Social online platforms, chat rooms, and smartphone apps encourage new modes of social, political, and economic engagement as well as new opportunities for creative expressions. Indeed, the Internet, seemingly boundless in its sublime breadth, is replete with social and communal interactions and entanglements, some of which de-center or unsettle real-time or real-world social relations and expectations.  The Internet is thus a fruitful space for the multiplatform exhibition of Queer Sites and Sounds to exist, as the works curated on CA+T's website, alongside the organization's Tumblr and Pinterest websites, explore the possibilities of queer engagement across multiple virtual spaces and showcase queer new media and digital interventions.

 

Launched over the course of the first two months of 2014, Queer Sites and Sounds features digital artwork, videos, audio recordings, scholarship, and writing that question the ways that we think of "queer" as an embodied identity and "queer" as it relates to narrative and digital forms and digital literacies. That is, in Queer Sites and Sounds, “queer” is defined broadly to include non-heteronormative genders and sexualities in both Filipino and Western contexts (e.g., LGBTQ, bakla, and tomboy) as well as performativity and aesthetics (e.g.,  'kitsch,' 'spectacle,' and 'camp') that challenge and go beyond how Filipino bodies, affects, and processes are conventionally understood.

 

Unlike real-time, real-world exhibitions in which the works are revealed all at once and often in a singular space, the works in Queer Sites and Sounds unfold on CA+T's website in stages. Taken together, the works in Queer Sites and Sounds reveal the amazing possibilities of today's current digital and new media moment. The exhibition showcases queer expressive practices that dare us to look, read, and reflect.

 

Curator: Jan Christian Bernabe
January 2014

 

Featuring Work by
Eliza Barrios, Jeffrey Augustine Songco, Jan Padios, Kiam Marcelo Junio, Kat Larson, Laurel Fantauzzo, Ronaldo Wilson, Gina Osterloh, Jaime Woo, Patrick Henze (Patsy l'Amour laLove), and Miguel Libarnes.

 

 
Pinterest QSS Crowdsourcing Exhibition

 

Queer Sites and Sounds was made possible by the generous support of its sponsors.
For a full list of the sponsors, click here.

"God Mend Thy Every Flaw ..."

Kiam Marcelo Junio

2013 17 in. x 24 in. Material courtesy of Kiam Marcelo Junio From American Karaoke

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Kiam Marcelo Junio

b. 1984
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Kiam Marcelo Junio is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist working across media, from dance and performance to sculpture, installation, photography, and writing. Their research and art work center around queer identity, Philippine history and the Filipino diaspora, Western imperialism, and personal and collective healing through collaborative projects and individual self-work. Kiam served seven years in the US Navy as a Hospital Corpsman. Their work has been exhibited, screened, and performed throughout Chicago at Boyfriends, Defibrillator, Links Hall, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Bijou Theater, and the Field Museum, as well as in New York City, NY; Riverside, CA; Mexico City, Mexico; Cadiz, Spain; and Montreal, Canada. They were born in the Philippines and have lived in the US, Japan, and Spain.

The role of the artist, the magician, the prophet, and each individual, is to bring about change in the world through one's own personal transformations, revolutions, and revelations.

As an artist who is also a person of color, an Asian American, a Filipino immigrant, a US Navy veteran, gender-fluid, and decidedly queer, my work exists within these contexts but is not bound by them. I use a multidisciplinary approach in my research and art making. I develop a conceptual ecosystem in which my works function in myriad ways, informing one another. I create photos, installations, videos, and performances. I work collaboratively with local artists, dancers, musicians, and organizers. I foster relationships within my communities and relish in our blossoming. By working with others, we come to know and become more ourselves.

I look towards the future and feel its inertia - the momentum that propels us into infinite uncharted moments, carrying the past forward

location

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  • Born: Quezon City, Philippines
  • Based: Chicago, IL, USA

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"Land Where My Fathers Died ..."

Kiam Marcelo Junio

2013 17 in. x 24 in. Material courtesy of Kiam Marcelo Junio From American Karaoke

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Kiam Marcelo Junio

b. 1984
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Kiam Marcelo Junio is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist working across media, from dance and performance to sculpture, installation, photography, and writing. Their research and art work center around queer identity, Philippine history and the Filipino diaspora, Western imperialism, and personal and collective healing through collaborative projects and individual self-work. Kiam served seven years in the US Navy as a Hospital Corpsman. Their work has been exhibited, screened, and performed throughout Chicago at Boyfriends, Defibrillator, Links Hall, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Bijou Theater, and the Field Museum, as well as in New York City, NY; Riverside, CA; Mexico City, Mexico; Cadiz, Spain; and Montreal, Canada. They were born in the Philippines and have lived in the US, Japan, and Spain.

The role of the artist, the magician, the prophet, and each individual, is to bring about change in the world through one's own personal transformations, revolutions, and revelations.

As an artist who is also a person of color, an Asian American, a Filipino immigrant, a US Navy veteran, gender-fluid, and decidedly queer, my work exists within these contexts but is not bound by them. I use a multidisciplinary approach in my research and art making. I develop a conceptual ecosystem in which my works function in myriad ways, informing one another. I create photos, installations, videos, and performances. I work collaboratively with local artists, dancers, musicians, and organizers. I foster relationships within my communities and relish in our blossoming. By working with others, we come to know and become more ourselves.

I look towards the future and feel its inertia - the momentum that propels us into infinite uncharted moments, carrying the past forward

location

X
  • Born: Quezon City, Philippines
  • Based: Chicago, IL, USA

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"Rockets Red Glare ..."

Kiam Marcelo Junio

2013 17 in. x 24 in. Material courtesy of Kiam Marcelo Junio from American Karaoke

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Kiam Marcelo Junio

b. 1984
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Kiam Marcelo Junio is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist working across media, from dance and performance to sculpture, installation, photography, and writing. Their research and art work center around queer identity, Philippine history and the Filipino diaspora, Western imperialism, and personal and collective healing through collaborative projects and individual self-work. Kiam served seven years in the US Navy as a Hospital Corpsman. Their work has been exhibited, screened, and performed throughout Chicago at Boyfriends, Defibrillator, Links Hall, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Bijou Theater, and the Field Museum, as well as in New York City, NY; Riverside, CA; Mexico City, Mexico; Cadiz, Spain; and Montreal, Canada. They were born in the Philippines and have lived in the US, Japan, and Spain.

The role of the artist, the magician, the prophet, and each individual, is to bring about change in the world through one's own personal transformations, revolutions, and revelations.

As an artist who is also a person of color, an Asian American, a Filipino immigrant, a US Navy veteran, gender-fluid, and decidedly queer, my work exists within these contexts but is not bound by them. I use a multidisciplinary approach in my research and art making. I develop a conceptual ecosystem in which my works function in myriad ways, informing one another. I create photos, installations, videos, and performances. I work collaboratively with local artists, dancers, musicians, and organizers. I foster relationships within my communities and relish in our blossoming. By working with others, we come to know and become more ourselves.

I look towards the future and feel its inertia - the momentum that propels us into infinite uncharted moments, carrying the past forward

location

X
  • Born: Quezon City, Philippines
  • Based: Chicago, IL, USA

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"This Land Was Made for You and Me ..."

Kiam Marcelo Junio

2013 17 in. x 24 in. Material courtesy of Kiam Marcelo Junio From American Karaoke

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Kiam Marcelo Junio

b. 1984
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Kiam Marcelo Junio is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist working across media, from dance and performance to sculpture, installation, photography, and writing. Their research and art work center around queer identity, Philippine history and the Filipino diaspora, Western imperialism, and personal and collective healing through collaborative projects and individual self-work. Kiam served seven years in the US Navy as a Hospital Corpsman. Their work has been exhibited, screened, and performed throughout Chicago at Boyfriends, Defibrillator, Links Hall, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Bijou Theater, and the Field Museum, as well as in New York City, NY; Riverside, CA; Mexico City, Mexico; Cadiz, Spain; and Montreal, Canada. They were born in the Philippines and have lived in the US, Japan, and Spain.

The role of the artist, the magician, the prophet, and each individual, is to bring about change in the world through one's own personal transformations, revolutions, and revelations.

As an artist who is also a person of color, an Asian American, a Filipino immigrant, a US Navy veteran, gender-fluid, and decidedly queer, my work exists within these contexts but is not bound by them. I use a multidisciplinary approach in my research and art making. I develop a conceptual ecosystem in which my works function in myriad ways, informing one another. I create photos, installations, videos, and performances. I work collaboratively with local artists, dancers, musicians, and organizers. I foster relationships within my communities and relish in our blossoming. By working with others, we come to know and become more ourselves.

I look towards the future and feel its inertia - the momentum that propels us into infinite uncharted moments, carrying the past forward

location

X
  • Born: Quezon City, Philippines
  • Based: Chicago, IL, USA

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American Karaoke

Kiam Marcelo Junio

2013 Video of performance Duration: 12m 27s Material courtesy of artist

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Kiam Marcelo Junio

b. 1984
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Kiam Marcelo Junio is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist working across media, from dance and performance to sculpture, installation, photography, and writing. Their research and art work center around queer identity, Philippine history and the Filipino diaspora, Western imperialism, and personal and collective healing through collaborative projects and individual self-work. Kiam served seven years in the US Navy as a Hospital Corpsman. Their work has been exhibited, screened, and performed throughout Chicago at Boyfriends, Defibrillator, Links Hall, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Bijou Theater, and the Field Museum, as well as in New York City, NY; Riverside, CA; Mexico City, Mexico; Cadiz, Spain; and Montreal, Canada. They were born in the Philippines and have lived in the US, Japan, and Spain.

The role of the artist, the magician, the prophet, and each individual, is to bring about change in the world through one's own personal transformations, revolutions, and revelations.

As an artist who is also a person of color, an Asian American, a Filipino immigrant, a US Navy veteran, gender-fluid, and decidedly queer, my work exists within these contexts but is not bound by them. I use a multidisciplinary approach in my research and art making. I develop a conceptual ecosystem in which my works function in myriad ways, informing one another. I create photos, installations, videos, and performances. I work collaboratively with local artists, dancers, musicians, and organizers. I foster relationships within my communities and relish in our blossoming. By working with others, we come to know and become more ourselves.

I look towards the future and feel its inertia - the momentum that propels us into infinite uncharted moments, carrying the past forward

location

X
  • Born: Quezon City, Philippines
  • Based: Chicago, IL, USA

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Anonymous Front

Gina Osterloh

2010 Archival pigment print with UV laminate, mounted on dibond, with white frame Material courtesy of Gina Osterloh and François Ghebaly From Copy Flat series

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Gina Osterloh

b. 1973

Gina Osterloh is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice embodies photography, film, performance, and drawing as a site for questions of visibility, perception, and being. Osterloh cites her experience of growing up mixed-race in Ohio as a set of formative experiences that led her to photography and larger questions of how a viewer perceives difference.  Her 2012 exhibition Anonymous Front, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, featured a documentary video essay on physical blindness, perception, and identity, created with the blind massage therapist cooperative in Manila, Philippines called New Vision. The foundations for this documentary project with New Vision was made possible by a Fulbright Research Grant in 2008. Other exhibitions include solo exhibitions Gina Osterloh at Higher Pictures; Slice, Strike, Make an X, Prick! at François Ghebaly Gallery; Nothing to See Here There Never Was at Silverlens Gallery; and group exhibitions Energy Charge: Connecting to Ana Mendieta at Arizona State University Museum, This is Not America: Resistance, Protest and Poetics at Arizona State University Museum, Demolition Women at the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University. Osterloh has exhibited internationally in places such as Hong Kong, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Indonesia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City. Her work has been reviewed in The New Yorker Magazine, Art in America, Art Forum Critic’s Pick, Hyphen Magazine, Art Asia Pacific, Asian Art News, Giant Robot, and KCET Artbound, among others.

 

Osterloh has taught courses and workshops in photography, video, and performance art at the University of California San Diego, CalArts, Otterbien University, California State University of Fullerton and Long Beach, and Santa Ana College to name a few.

location

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  • Born: Texas, USA
  • Based: Los Angeles, CA, USA
  • Also Based in: Ohio, USA

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Art Must Be Beautiful

Kiam Marcelo Junio

2013 Video of performance Duration: 1h 18m 19s Material courtesy of artist

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Kiam Marcelo Junio

b. 1984
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Kiam Marcelo Junio is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist working across media, from dance and performance to sculpture, installation, photography, and writing. Their research and art work center around queer identity, Philippine history and the Filipino diaspora, Western imperialism, and personal and collective healing through collaborative projects and individual self-work. Kiam served seven years in the US Navy as a Hospital Corpsman. Their work has been exhibited, screened, and performed throughout Chicago at Boyfriends, Defibrillator, Links Hall, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Bijou Theater, and the Field Museum, as well as in New York City, NY; Riverside, CA; Mexico City, Mexico; Cadiz, Spain; and Montreal, Canada. They were born in the Philippines and have lived in the US, Japan, and Spain.

The role of the artist, the magician, the prophet, and each individual, is to bring about change in the world through one's own personal transformations, revolutions, and revelations.

As an artist who is also a person of color, an Asian American, a Filipino immigrant, a US Navy veteran, gender-fluid, and decidedly queer, my work exists within these contexts but is not bound by them. I use a multidisciplinary approach in my research and art making. I develop a conceptual ecosystem in which my works function in myriad ways, informing one another. I create photos, installations, videos, and performances. I work collaboratively with local artists, dancers, musicians, and organizers. I foster relationships within my communities and relish in our blossoming. By working with others, we come to know and become more ourselves.

I look towards the future and feel its inertia - the momentum that propels us into infinite uncharted moments, carrying the past forward

location

X
  • Born: Quezon City, Philippines
  • Based: Chicago, IL, USA

comments

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Bruise Points and Infinite Pricks

Gina Osterloh

2010 Archival pigment print with UV laminate, mounted on dibond, with white frame Material courtesy of Gina Osterloh and François Ghebaly From the Copy Flat series

contributor

X

Gina Osterloh

b. 1973

Gina Osterloh is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice embodies photography, film, performance, and drawing as a site for questions of visibility, perception, and being. Osterloh cites her experience of growing up mixed-race in Ohio as a set of formative experiences that led her to photography and larger questions of how a viewer perceives difference.  Her 2012 exhibition Anonymous Front, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, featured a documentary video essay on physical blindness, perception, and identity, created with the blind massage therapist cooperative in Manila, Philippines called New Vision. The foundations for this documentary project with New Vision was made possible by a Fulbright Research Grant in 2008. Other exhibitions include solo exhibitions Gina Osterloh at Higher Pictures; Slice, Strike, Make an X, Prick! at François Ghebaly Gallery; Nothing to See Here There Never Was at Silverlens Gallery; and group exhibitions Energy Charge: Connecting to Ana Mendieta at Arizona State University Museum, This is Not America: Resistance, Protest and Poetics at Arizona State University Museum, Demolition Women at the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University. Osterloh has exhibited internationally in places such as Hong Kong, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Indonesia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City. Her work has been reviewed in The New Yorker Magazine, Art in America, Art Forum Critic’s Pick, Hyphen Magazine, Art Asia Pacific, Asian Art News, Giant Robot, and KCET Artbound, among others.

 

Osterloh has taught courses and workshops in photography, video, and performance art at the University of California San Diego, CalArts, Otterbien University, California State University of Fullerton and Long Beach, and Santa Ana College to name a few.

location

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  • Born: Texas, USA
  • Based: Los Angeles, CA, USA
  • Also Based in: Ohio, USA

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Confessional

Jeffrey Augustine Songco

2014 Digital print 30 in. x 12.5 in. CA+T Commissioned Work

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Jeffrey Augustine Songco

b. 1983
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Jeffrey Augustine Songco is a multi-media artist. Born and raised in New Jersey, USA, to immigrant Filipino parents, his artistic identity developed at a young age with training in classical ballet, voice, and musical theater. Today, he uses these disciplines in the performing arts to produce stories as works of visual art. He holds a B.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.F.A. from San Francisco Art Institute. He has exhibited throughout the United States, including the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids. His writings have appeared in Art21 Blog, Bad at Sports, The Huffington Post, and Hyperallergic. He would like to be the US representative to the 2023 Venice Biennale. He currently lives and works in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

My obsessive consumption of superficial goods translates into the production of peculiar appropriation. There’s a lot of stuff out there to play with — things (as objects) and ideas (as language) are my materials. I'm interested in physical behavior, emotional narratives, and performed identities. I believe my artwork produces an infectious feeling of anxiety that can only be alleviated by a) the acceptance of the fluidity of meaning, 2) the impossibility of fully comprehending the absurd, and d) the inability to control your own laughter.

As the commissioned artist for the Center for Art and Thought’s exhibition Queer Sites and Sounds, I created a limited edition digital print titled Confessional. This work is the third iteration in a series of photographic prints depicting my “bag head character” juxtaposed with text from a grand narrative.

In 2012, I wrote my first screenplay titled The Host. The title refers to the protagonist – a white, affluent, suburban mom who is the beloved host on a popular home-shopping television network. The title also refers to the bread that is transformed into the body of Christ and eaten during Catholic mass. Throughout the film, the woman is negotiating her identity as a devout Catholic woman and as a mom to her recently outed college-aged son. In front of a million television viewers, she goes through her own transformation, performing a role that caters to a culturally conservative America, while knowing full well that her gay son is quietly shifting her away from those values. When I wrote the screenplay, I was just a writer with a dream, but I was also an artist with a camera. I created the triptych Hosanna as a way to visually manifest the text of The Host. In Hosanna, quotations from The Host flank the solitary white figure that is performing the role of the host. “Hosanna” is a biblical word that is shouted to express joy and adoration – an old-timer word for “OMG” or a phrase a woman might say when she sees sparkling jewelry.

By dressing in all white and placing a bag on my head, I enact a queer performance of the protagonist – a beautiful and empowered heterosexual white woman with personal anxiety that looms around her as she fulfills her own performance of self. This same concept can be used with the next iteration in the series, the diptych God Bless (Miss) America. I didn’t write a screenplay, but I’ve always been transfixed by pageantry – count me in as part of the demographic obsessed with TLC’s Toddlers and Tiaras who can also tell the difference between the Miss America and Miss USA pageants. The narrative of beauty pageants is so common in American popular culture that it has become a cliché, so I chose to use a clichéd question as the text within the artwork. In front of millions of television viewers, a pageant contestant must answer a seemingly bleak question with something that caters to the pageant judges and, ultimately, the identity of the nation.

I’m currently in the process of writing a screenplay titled The Cast, a dramatic film that focuses on a cast member of a reality television show about five affluent white married women living in San Francisco. Queer Sites and Sounds is the perfect site to visually translate the text of The Cast like I had done with The Host. My new artwork is titled Confessional, which refers to the idea of the Catholic Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation. Sharing and confessing sins to a priest in a small room allows the sinner to be absolved from mortal sins and avoid Hell. Decades ago, the word “confessional” was introduced to reality television when subjects of the show were taken aside from the main activity into a small room, and asked to share and confess how they felt about the events that just occurred. Subjects broke the fourth wall and spoke directly to the camera to share all their feelings and provide a proper narrative to the plot. The confessional has aesthetically evolved into what it is today, with the confessional interview being highly stylized and elaborately produced. Bravo Television’s The Real Housewives series provides fantastic examples of stylized confessionals, with characters confessing in front of luxurious backgrounds.

I’ve always had an interest in – some would say obsession with – white people. While I shine the spotlight on an American ideal, I don’t deny the multiple references to a darker side of white America: Christian extremism, political nationalism, military torture, and white supremacy. In Confessional, I chose to display a quotation that revealed a dramatic side of the reality show – adultery. This kind of saturated American identity is the root of my bag head character, which ultimately plays the role of an anonymous white person subject to the projections of any given story.

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  • Born: New Jersey, USA
  • Based: Grand Rapids, MI

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Dad's Garage

Ronaldo Wilson

2012 Digital recording of spoken word Duration: 9m 15s Material courtesy of Ronaldo Wilson

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Ronaldo Wilson

b. 1970

Born in Millington, TN, a Navy Base. Googled the city. There’s a photo on the Wikipedia page of Woodstock Elementary, which flashed me back to being in the driveway that wraps around the school to a small white boy in glasses, on the back of a his mom’s bike in a baby seat, little boys, me among them, hurling epithets at him: “Hey Googly-Eyes” or “Four-Eyed-Freak!” Such is the tension in my now happy obsession with reading glasses: 20/20 otherwise, but let me say, that as I look back, his eyes point to the kind of man I like to see, now. 
 
To Guam, over a few years, Military Zones, Officers, Blue Angels, and there, filling the scooped holes in the sand— a few beats away from the Mariana Trench—with liquid wax, sticking wicks in them, letting the “candles” cool with the class.  Lunch: A Hamburger wrapped in Aluminum Foil, Ketchup.
 
Back to Millington.  Playing in a tree house.  My desire then, to climb up it, and to stare.  Eat, boiled hotdogs.  Up there, cicada shells.  The trucks in the Tennessian Summer spout pesticides.
 
My mother upholstered the inside of a Ford Pinto station wagon, and we left for Alameda, CA. Slept at Rest Stops and Motels.  Dad let us steer.
 
In California, I learned the body is made up of salt water, mostly, and I’d fish in the Bay, and I watched one Perch on a hook dance to its death.
 
Sacramento, one boy I know from high school was shot in the head, left dead near the river.  Science, Beakers.  Drove a Volkswagen Scirocco.  Cal, Berkeley, the wagging tongue of a pervert wanting to meet in Dwinelle. His running shorts, see through.
 
Candy, my alter-ego from Jr. High to High School, even at home from college.  Lots of Phone Sex—learned the ropes of a conceptual notion of race & being this way, to be an imagined girl, to get old men to fall in love with me, her, to get off, and to vanish from any direct history of the self by hanging up.
 
I am a fish and love to swim, do yoga, and play tennis—I sought and seek fluidity.  NY, CA, NY, CA.  I ricocheted for many years back and forth, lovers, love, DALLAS, still do, my partner, my love – we had a cat that we borrowed, until it died by a car hit.  A film is being made about it in which I’m Pudgy.  I try to keep the fat off and sweat a lot
 
In NY, in an M.F.A. program at New York University, late nights at S/M Clubs in the then-Meat Packing District, Street Tranny Queens, Banjee Boys, working on my earliest “real” poems, or the poetry as point of view—freak wants to suck cocaine off my cock in a Dungeon, waves of men. Hotel-Tea-Rooms, anywhere, but started a PhD at City University of New York Graduate Center, and finished it, in three states, over 13 years, on 20th Century and Contemporary Black Poetics, Poetry, and Visual Culture, and I am now, currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
 
Before that, I taught at Mount Holyoke College in MA.  Six years of cutting my teeth, tone, and vision between the poem and the critical essay, led me to complete my poems and the life in which it all began to COLLECT—
 
My first book, winner of the Cave Canem Prize, Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), is a series of prose poems that captures the interrelationship of the two central characters, looking into their psyches and thoughts of race, class, and identity: Black, Asian, and Queer, who travels through dreams, city streets, gyms, porn theaters, beaches, ferries, familial memories and landscapes.
 
My second book, Poems of the Black Object (2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry and an Asian American Literary Award in Poetry, contains works that slip between poem and essay, theory and epistle, revealing even more ways back into the fluid world, offering ways to make even more elastic yet still sharply pointed questions around and through race, sexuality, and desire.

Central to my research and an influence in my poetry, the visual artist Ellen Gallagher points out that “black bodies” have been “materially and physically constricted.” However, for Gallagher, “being doesn’t only exist inside the body.” As she puts it, “this is not a slave narrative. It’s after the explosion. The fracture has already happened.”  The opening lines of Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “Boy Breaking Glass,” help to illustrate this point, as the speaker decries: “I shall create! If not a note, a hole,/ If not an overture, a desecration.”
 
It is in the after-the-fracture field, far from the realm of the poem, in the realm of the black body and its insistent constriction and desecration, where the radical form of the poem occurs. To write poems and to write about African American poetry and visual art is to mediate one’s self-construction within the explosion and after the fracture.
 
The intersection is fluid, where my eyes are not infected.  I am allergic, these days, so much. The red you see is rage. Steroid drops abate.  There is a battle, inside, and it is violent.  There is a battle and I am giving you, fluid.  Pushed, I stretch out to hit the ball, the head speed of my racket is quick—the ball will spin away from you. I am an object revolving through race, sex, and desire, native and other to Black/Asian/Queer. I live between Santa Cruz, CA. and Long Island, NY, and I often let go, after going off, posing with jawbone in mind. 
 
A coming book, Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other is framed by a father’s dementia, a vehicle through which to explore racial and sexual violence, trauma and pleasure through multiple forms, from the sonnet to the journal, free verse poem to the lyric essay, to original ink and watercolor portraits. I slip outside of myself. Another, Lucy 72, originally seventy-two poems written in long, loosely structured couplets, are now honed down but still in couplets, to reveal a fluid narrative perspective that explores race, sexuality and representation both within the field of my imagination and, simultaneously, in my observations and analyses of my experiences in artist colonies.
 
As a poet, critic, and artist, I explore various conceptual possibilities that extend beyond the poem into expanding notions of poetics and critical inquiry across multiple mediums.  I have also been engaged in a solo multimedia project, Off the Dome: Rants, Raps and Meditations. These soundscapes, also at once a discrete album, are inspired by freestyle rap and performance art, combine totally improvised, original poetry captured on my iPhone, documented while jogging on the beach, dancing, practicing yoga, sitting in cafés or restaurants that vocalize interrogations of representation, selfhood, and place. To be free.
 
I’ve studied with many poets: June Jordan, Ishmael Reed, Yusef Komunyakka, Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, David Rivard, Cornelius Eady, Toi Derricotte, Allen Ginsburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Myung Mi Kim. I've also studied wih many critics -  Barbara Christian, Alfred Arteaga, Michele Wallace - and those who’ve helped me to work between poetry and criticism - Eve Sedgwick, Meena Alexander, and Wayne Koestenbaum.
 
I’ve also been influenced by peers and mentors: Dawn Lundy Martin, Duriel E. Harris, Khary Polk, Wesley Yu, Iyko Day, Torkwase Dyson, M. Nourbese Philip, John Keene, giovanni singleton, Tisa Bryant, Erica Hunt, and many others whose work, conversations, and often collaborations have fueled my engagement with poetry, language, and art. 
 
Out of books, I stared at water, the brown slick of the Mississippi River, then the wide beaches in Guam. Overlooking cliffs, I lived near the Mariana Trench, Navy brat, playing on playgrounds made of land-bound Navy ships, a submarine buried in a field, the sleek surface of a copper plaque that marks memory.  
 
What keeps me a poet arises when I swim, today, in the resort pool, stretching, my back loose, fingers curled then opening, hands cutting below, my arms dart forward and release. This movement twins my backhands yesterday: my left hand pulling back the racket’s throat, like a bow and arrow before I make contact, the arms wing out, my chest opens.  How I strike the water is how I hit the ball—almost unconsciously—I enter the poem through its motion, time and space. 
 

location

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  • Born: Millington, TN, USA
  • Based: Santa Cruz, CA, USA
  • Also Based in: Port Jefferson Station, NY, USA

comments

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