Trans Art Is: Love & Liberation
February 14th – March 31st at the Andersonville Galleria
The Chicago Therapy Collective is pleased to present Trans Art Is: Love & Liberation, an exhibition featuring 14 trans and gender non-conforming artists working in various mediums from photography to performance. Focusing on themes of love, sex and intimacy, the exhibition runs from February 14th to March 31st, 2019 2019 with it’s reception taking place on Valentines day 7:30-9:00pm.
Curated by artist Ken Folk, Love & Liberation underlies the spirit of the Chicago Therapy Collective’s Trans Art Is project by building platforms and opportunities for connection, expression, and space centered around Trans/GNC individuals’ experiences and perspectives. Trans Art Is seeks to amplify these voices, making visible the realities and existence of Trans/GNC artists, and in this case, those that relate to love, sex, and intimacy. The exhibition features creative and transgressive works by CJ Run, Evan Fusco, Leo Williams, Bun Stout, Jordyn Belli, Asha Adisa, Marius Dania, Alex Ziauddin, Jean Sonderand, Pascale Jarvis, Malachi Lily, Alloiza Mari, Larisa Wade and Emily Morley.
“In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial. …In order to be utilized, our erotic feelings must be recognized. The need for sharing deep feeling is a human need. “
– Audrey Lorde, Sister Outsider
Trans and non-gender conforming individuals are often a site for oppression and exploitation. Historically treated through the ideology of a cis-straight patriarchy, trans bodies are reduced to objects of fear or subjects of sexual objectification; often commodities of desire for the cis gaze, to be owned or consumed but never one with agency or self-determination.
Sexual agency is a step towards empowerment, to be reclaimed by those who have an embodied trans/GNC experience of what intimacy can be.
Love & Liberation is an exhibition that explores that power, the complications of agency and the dimensions of sex, love and intimacy of Trans and Gender Non-Conforming individuals. The works rely on sexual bodily autonomy through the self-determination of trans embodied experience. Here, the erotic is not vilified but instead used as a ground for critical engagement and celebration: captured moments of tender embraces, embroidered reclamations, and unabashedly honest self-portraits.
IG: @chitherapycollective
About the Curator
Curator of Love & Liberation is artist Ken Folk. They are a nonbinary trans, queer, Haitian artist from Texas who creates works about their existence as a Black, queer, nonbinary trans person navigating chronic illness, gender, institutionalized racism, and what it means to make art as survival- also romance.
IG: @block.them
kenfolkart.com
About the Producer
Producer of Love & Liberation is artist Vicente Ugartechea is a trans, first generation Mexican-American artist and educator. Drawing from personal narrative, they explore landscapes of constructed normativities, ethnocentrism, and privilege as a way of defining and redefining issues that subsist within marginalized identities.
IG: @transsexualjesus