Other Places at CCNY

Becoming 10, 2010
© Kerstin Honeit

Other Places / Curated by Tema Stauffer
November 9 - December 10
Camera Club of New York
336 West 37th Street, Suite 206, New York, NY

Opening Reception on Wednesday, November 9, 6- 8pm

The exhibition at the Camera Club of New York stems from Culturehall Feature Issue 60 published online in January 2011. This issue drew connections between contemporary artists whose work in photography focuses on identities, relationships and environments defined by unconventional expressions of sexuality and gender. As the idea of realizing an exhibition of this work at CCNY evolved, the original group of artists expanded.

Other Places brings together different generations of international artists whose photographs contribute to a dialogue about individuals and communities—past and present—existing in social and political margins based on sexuality and sexual identity. A selection of work by five artists from the United States, Mexico and Germany serves as a foundation for examination of each of their larger series and continuing practices.

Los Angeles-based artist Kaucyila Brooke documents the history of lesbian bars in cities and towns across the United States and Europe. This ongoing project, The Boy Mechanic, has been exhibited at galleries and museums around the world throughout the past decade. Other Places includes Brooke’s two-sided offset poster originally produced for exhibition at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, depicting photographs of the sites of seventeen former and three current bars, along with narrative descriptions of her encounters with owners and patrons of these establishments. The photographs, videos, maps and text of the larger project create a historical record of lesbian bar culture and assert the significance of these social spaces and the recollections of those who participated in them.

Doug Ischar produced a series of photographs documenting a community of gay men who congregated on a Chicago beach in the mid-1980s. Two of the twenty-six images comprising Marginal Waters are included in the exhibition, and the entire series is reproduced in a catalogue published by Golden Gallery accompanying the first exhibition of prints in 2009. The images convey the relaxed intimacy and open expression of sexuality at the Belmont Rocks, one of the most visible urban gay beaches in North America nearly a quarter of a century ago. Omar Gamez similarly photographs environments where gay men gather to celebrate their physicality and to create bonds without inhibitions. His Natura series provides an insider’s view of a nudist retreat near Mexico City—a weekend meeting spot for men to engage in bare-fleshed communal revelries.

Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life in America by Molly Landreth reflects a cross-country journey over the course of more than half a decade photographing gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people of various ages, races and economic backgrounds. Two portraits from this study of what it means to be queer in America today focus on Cruz, aka Jalessa, performing drag for the first time in a backyard in Columbus, Ohio, and Clare Mercy, a truck driver and musician perched on the back of her car in Bellingham, Washington. Berlin-based artist Kerstin Honeit, in Becoming 10, explores gender construction through a series of photographs in which she assumes the identities of nine half-siblings whom she has never met. The images appear as film stills of everyday urban scenes in which Honeit performs a cast of vivid male and female characters.

In conjunction with the exhibition of Other Places from November 9 – December 10, 2011, additional images and information about the participating artists will be available through their Culturehall portfolios. Also as part of the Other Places exhibition, CCNY presents a talk with artist Molly Landreth, with an introduction by curator Tema Stauffer on Friday, November 18 at 7pm at the CCNY Studio. Landreth will present work from the Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life in America series, as well as other bodies of work.

culturehall feature 60: OTHER PLACES

Historically, one of the most powerful aspects of the medium of photography, particularly through genres of portraiture and documentary work, has been its ability to make marginalized individuals and communities visible. Culturehall features four photographers in this issue whose work specifically focuses on identities, relationships, and environments outside of heterosexual norms. Like their predecessors and contemporaries – Peter Hujar, Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson, and Catherine Opie, to name a few – these artists, through widely varied photographic strategies, portray people and social spaces whose differences are defined by unconventional expressions of sexuality and gender.

The constructed images in Kelli Connell’s ongoing series, Double Life, elicit multiple readings. One of these is an interpretation of masculinity and femininity as they manifest in the context of lesbian relationships. Using a single model, Connell uses digital technology to produce fictitious photographs that appear almost like film stills in which a psychologically charged moment exists between two characters. In more or less subtle ways, one of the women appears to perform a masculine role, where the other performs a feminine role. Her photographs raise questions about how gender dynamics are expressed in lesbian relationships and the nature of gender itself as a social construct. What makes the identity of this single subject different from that of her “other self” in each image are cultural cues like hairstyle, make-up, clothing, and body language. Reminiscent of scenes between Alma and Elisabet from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Connell creates spaces fraught with tension and ambiguity.

Molly Landreth’s series of large-format photographs, Queer America, celebrates a broad notion of queer identity. Among her subjects are gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people – individuals, couples, groups, and families existing outside mainstream conventions of sexuality and gender. Landreth asks her subjects, some of whom she meets through Facebook or Myspace, to suggest meaningful places in their own homes and neighborhoods where she can make portraits of them wearing clothing of their choice. These frank portraits made in states across the country document GLBT subjects of various ages, races, and economic backgrounds. In one image, Landreth photographed Cruz, aka Jalesa, in a backyard in Columbus, Ohio. At 17, Jalesa had just performed drag for the first time at Baptist church camp and struck poses learned from watching America’s Next Top Model. Landreth’s method of creating these photographs enables her subjects to present themselves as they wish to be seen; however, an inescapable truth is that how they are perceived entirely depends on who is looking.

Using a hidden camera, Omar Gamez spies on furtive sexual encounters between men in cuartos oscuros, or darkrooms, in Mexico City. Like Tennessee William’s Joy Rio – a formerly opulent opera house converted into a third-rate cinema where sexual dramas transpire in the roped-off regions – the darkrooms in Gamez’s photographs exist in old houses with tall ceilings, candelabras, and fading gilt. Legally, the spaces pass as gyms, and songs from radio stations fill the large hallways and decaying rooms with rhythmic sounds. Gamez occupies these spaces both as an artist and as a participant. In his images, the faces and identities of men are obscured beyond recognition by shadows, soft focus, and framing. What is visible are fragments of trysts between strangers where light leaks into darkness. The impressionistic stills and video of The Dark Book secretly capture anonymous men like ghosts in a ritual based in desire, mystery, and danger.

In contrast, Doug Ischar’s Marginal Waters series depicts gay men basking in sunlight on a Chicago beach. Ischar documented a community of men who congregated on the Belmont Rocks of Lake Michigan in the mid-eighties before the site was demolished in 2003. The images communicate a sense of warmth and relaxed intimacy - as well as freedom and openness in sexual expression – within a group of kindred spirits. In some cases, the men are coupled and shown in sensual embraces. Besides their historical significance as documentation of a specific cultural moment, what makes the images so engaging is the pure pleasure of looking at them. The saturated colors of the sky, water, and skin tones of seductive bodies accompanied by an assortment of quirky artifacts, like the biography of Diane Arbus and a pink flamingo or the eighties hairstyles and slinky shorts, result in irresistible pictures.


Head to Head, by Kelli Connell


Cruz, aka Jalesa, by Molly Landreth


From The Dark Book, by Omar Gamez


Marginal Waters #14, by Doug Ischar