Carolina Borja. Lucha, 2017; collage and acrylic; 12 x 10 in. Courtesy of Soo Visual Arts Center, Minneapolis.

In the exhibition Unflinching Facades at Soo Visual Arts Center, new collages by Carolina Borja and Jesse Matthew Peterson plunge into the amorphous archives of religious iconography and fashion. By employing mixed media and visual manipulation, Borja (the subject of this review) alters the concealed power structures beneath the sumptuous veneer of mass representation. In the series All of Them Us (2017), Borja injects appropriated images of saints to reconsider their importance outside of a prescribed religious order. Layered collages featuring Catholic saints with glowing, hand-painted halos, removed from their natural habitat, congregate on the wall. Borja prompts viewers to “choose a saint of inspiration,” and provides a table of accoutrements, including artificial branches, candles, and plastic crowns, inviting viewers to “search for symbols that pair well with their needs.” Against a lustrous blue backdrop in the gallery space, viewers can also strike a saintly pose while (as the wall texts suggests) “acknowledging the strengths you lack and empower yourself.”

In a corresponding video, Borja wears a crown of flowers and a red cloak, freezing her pose as if for a photograph. She breaks this arresting stillness with a smile, exposing the exaggerated nature of her actions. Typically, Catholicism maintains a stringent grasp on the tenets of tradition and guides many Mexican customs, but Borja envisions a renewed enactment of devotion by inserting her own body in a campy performance—and encourages viewers to do the same.

Through this participatory work, Borja offers a reverent, yet critical, reinterpretation of the collisions between Mexican culture, Catholicism, and popular culture. She fragments the identity of the saints, manipulating their respective purposes to empower the practicing individual instead—a form of disidentification. Proposed by cultural theorist José Esteban Muñoz, disidentification is a way to create performative acts that endow social agency to minority groups [1]. Occupying a hybridized space between the extremes of rejecting and accepting oppressive societal scripts, disidentification allows individuals to express themselves by inscribing their own identity into an artistic subject. Borja engages her own body and those of viewers with a reiteration of religious personas (typically relegated only to saints), consequently destabilizing the subjective patterns that regiment multivalent bodies.

By encouraging visitors to appropriate these objects for their own benefit and take a picture, Borja alters religious iconography by obfuscating its origins, instead advocating for informed mass participation. Conflating the sacred with the increasingly prolific platform of instantaneous dissemination of an image, Borja liberates the body from religious regiments. Borja assembles a work that interrupts unquestioned devotional practices by illuminating the value of interpolating one’s ever-fluctuating self into this lineage of tradition.

Unflinching Facades: New Work by Carolina Borja and Jesse Matthew Petersen will be on view through May 20, 2017.

As an arts writer and organizer living in Minneapolis, Camille Erickson is seeking ways to advance equity and justice in the arts. Her writing and projects have been published by MnArtists.org, Twin Cities Daily Planet, the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Soap Factory, the Star Tribune, and more.

[1] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

Jacolby Satterwhite, 2014 (performance still); duration varied. Courtesy of the artist and The Whitney Museum, New York. Photo: Filip Wolak.

At NYU, I knew Muñoz within the fairly rigid context of the Performance Studies lectures he often officiated. Take Ecstasy With Me in many ways reproduced this academic setting. Rows of chairs stacked to the back of the museum’s cafe space formalized the event so that it felt more like church, or a wedding. “Welcome to art in a converted museum restaurant,” joked a member of performance collective My Barbarian while waiting for one of the night’s many tech glitches to be resolved.

As we filed into the lower level of the Whitney’s vestibule, video artist Jacolby Satterwhite vogued nimbly around the lobby carpet in a silver suit and helmet, out of which screens protruded like sexualized mushrooms (an iPhone trunk sprouted from his crotch). Under the harsh fluorescents, Satterwhite was one of the most proactive warriors in Muñoz’s army that night. A literal embodiment of theory, Satterwhite’s movements assertively performed queer futurity into existence on the indifferent lobby floor.

Miguel Gutierrez and I.n. Hafezi, p.49 future fuckup, 2014 (performance still); 5:00. Courtesy of the artists and The Whitney Museum, New York. Photo: Filip Wolak.

Other performances stuck closer to Muñoz’s dedication to a manifesto-like lyricism in affirmation of queerness. Juliana Huxtable, for example, stalked around the Whitney stage like a vision, reading highly personal prose rich with feverish dissatisfaction about the ways in which the world still does not measure up to queer vision, queer desire, queer necessity for survival. In everyday life, Huxtable reigns as a nightlife personality in that subaltern space Muñoz so lauded, and she has been instrumental in generating such space for a younger generation of queer New Yorkers.

Choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and I.n. Hafezi’s p.49 future fuckup led the duo through a spectrum of gelled work lights to a soundtrack of tinny glistening noise and ethereal discordant bells. In effortless but rigidly staged movements, they would race around the space, then stand stock still, one hand up, quickly waving with tightly wound eagerness and expectation. Perhaps they waved to an alien ship; perhaps at Muñoz’s fantastic future as it glistened on the horizon. Such waves were among the most resonant attempts to conjure queer futurity into the present, but the audience ultimately left the symposium still straining towards a utopia untapped.

Take Ecstasy With Me is a testament to the Biennial’s effort to amplify those queer voices, technologies, and aesthetics that continue to profoundly nourish contemporary art. But these were only gestures toward a breadth of necessary future toils. Muñoz invited us to join him in the spaces he wrote about; to actually perform queer futurity in those essential subaltern spaces, like the back room of that East Village bar, instead of merely staging performances in preparation for it. Take Ecstasy With Me is such a sad title. Like Muñoz’s legacy, it is a plea for communion that hangs in mid-air. It is a call still waiting to be answered.

Take Ecstasy With Me occurred on April 17, 2014 as part of The Whitney Museum of Art 2014 Biennial.

Nathan Vincent. Locker Room, 2011 (installation view); 144 x 228 in. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Stephen Miller.

The terms “queer” and “craft” have both been reclaimed by their communities to dislodge disparaging and ghettoizing stereotypes (in considering the reclamation of terms historically associated with marginalized communities into ones of agency and empowerment, I am indebted to L.J. Roberts’ article, “Put Your Thing Down, Flip It and Reverse It: Re-imaging Craft Identities Using Queer Theory”).[1] “Queer” became employed as a term of agency and empowerment in the 1980s, embraced for its ability to recognize a wide and fluid range of sexual identifications, and for shedding the associations with which the term “gay” was saddled at the height of the AIDS crisis. “Queer” is by nature ambiguous, rejecting simplistic heteronormative labels and systems. Likewise, in the early 2000s, the field of craft was in dire need of reclamation. Connotations of craft as amateurish, hobbyist, traditionally feminine, or conceptually empty spurred several major art institutions to drop the term from their official title. In 2002, the Bay Area art school California College of Arts and Crafts became just California College of the Arts, despite the institution’s deep history with the Arts and Crafts movement. In 2003, the American Craft Museum in New York became the Museum of Arts and Design. These very public dissociations from the word “craft” have prompted a new generation of craft activists and theorists to fight against craft’s second-class status in visual culture. New terms like “critical craft” or “contemporary craft” are being employed to shape a new progressive discourse around the medium.

Consideration of these fields’ analogous backgrounds of repression and reclamation underscores why craft can be so advantageous in articulating queer experiences and queer identities. Disidentification, a queer theoretical tactic, is about the “recycling and rethinking of encoded meaning.”[2] Craft has been burdened with a host of gendered and disempowering assumptions, but these assumptions become assets in the hands of artists aimed at exposing essentializing and exclusionary cultural messages about identity, sexuality, and desire.

LJ Roberts. The Queer Houses of Brooklyn in the Three Towns of Breukelen, Boswyck, and Midwout During the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era, 2011; Poly-fill, acrylic, rayon, Lurex, wool, polyster, cotton lame, sequins, and blended fabrics. 138 x 114 x 108 in. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Photo: The Smithsonian American Art Museum.

For Queer Threads, artist Nathan Vincent created Locker Room (2011), a life-size installation of a men’s locker room made entirely out of crocheted yarn. This site, loaded with heteronormative machismo and a history of vulnerability and exposure for queer bodies, is now completely covered with the ultra-feminine handicraft of crochet. The clever mixing of references dismantles the stability and validity of both sets of gendered assumptions.

Melanie Braverman’s piece, titled Queer (date), is a handmade patchwork quilt embroidered with a series of queer terms. Words like “top,” “pussy,” and “fag” are carefully embroidered in the palest of pink silk ribbon. The quilt itself is small and delicate, conjuring up a girlish childhood item of comfort and protection. The text on top raises both the queer notions of being “born this way” and the enculturation of gender norms inescapable in childhood. The quilt can thus fluctuate between acting as a metaphor for the “blanket” conventions of gender that society and parents enforce on children, and the experience of knowing at a young age one’s own dissonance from such conventions.

Sheila Pepe. Your Granny’s Not Square, 2008; crocheted shoelaces and yarn. 72 x 144 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Also invested in working with familial allusions is the artist Sheila Pepe, whose Your Granny’s Not Square (2008) is a clever play on the granny-square crochet technique and a reference to the grandmotherly associations tied to the medium. Pepe also directly references her own family in her material choice, using shoelaces in addition to yarn as a nod to her father, who was a shoemaker.  She seeks to position the work formally and theoretically with seminal fiber works by Eva Hesse and Faith Wilding, putting herself in conversation with the history of textiles in feminist art practices. She is literally interweaving her personal history within a larger network of craft-specific art history.

Similarly concerned with a forging of new queer connections is the artist LJ Roberts, whose work, The Queer Houses of Brooklyn in the Three Towns of Brueklen, Boswyck, and Midwout During the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era (2011), is a vibrant assemblage of  knitting, embroidery, and quilting that documents queer collectives in Brooklyn. Making reference to both the AIDS quilt and ACT UP iconography, it aligns itself with a lineage of queer advocacy. Its DIY aesthetic, overwhelming scale, and the detail of the work are ripe for examining the effort and endurance required to make new safe spaces for the queer community. It is an archive of the new families that are built in an enduring quest for belonging.

Queer Threads is a thoughtful record of the ongoing conversation between queer theoretical investments and critical craft theory. It also accentuates a shared potency between craft and queer thought: the ability to articulate difference and even flexibility within their own labels. As the art historian Julia Bryan Wilson has said, “Craft objects, like queer desires, are multiple….they refuse to be any one thing.”[3] The works in this show epitomize this ability to oscillate in their meaning. They underscore the strength of critical frameworks that disavow overdetermined and essentializing expectations, and thus make space for a richer multiplicity of identities, practices, and interpretations.

Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community is on view at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art through March 16, 2014.

[1] L.J. Roberts, “Put Your Thing Down, Flip It, and Reverse It: Re-Imaging Craft Identities Using Queer Theory,” in Extra/Ordinary: Craft Culture and Contemporary Art, ed. Maria Elena Buszek (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2011).

[2] Jose Esteban Munoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pg 30-31.

[3] Julia Bryan Wilson, “Queerly Made: Harmony Hammons Floorpieces,” The Journal of Modern Craft,Volume 2, Issue 1 (March 2009): pg 59-80.