// Opening 1.9.2007, 19.00 (Performance 21.00)
// Exhibition: 2.–11.9.2007
// Open during events and by appointment

Curtis Carman is a drag conceptual artist, having done sculpture and installations that sometimes integrate new media and performative aspects into an overall experience. The artist’s performance work is “of the street” and can be as simple as dressing silly and showing up in a public place. Recent work has been viewed in Documenta and MIX New York City.

Carman works from the belief that identity is multifaceted and dovetails with broader social constructions and shifting realities. The aim is to participate with the intent of effecting change.

The performance piece, "Lodestar" is a discombobulated journey that feels its way through a gay mid-life crisis full of love, misery, fear, and temptation and is backed with light. That’s the raspberries.

Statement of the artist:

I see art as an expression of an individual’s unique collective experience. In my work I seek to create windows through which people can see choices to foster a sense of spirituality and freedom. It is a diverse and varied art practice reflecting an urgent and vain attempt to express individualism in a tide of hegemony and sameness. To subvert this tide I employ frivolity, travesty, and at times a sense of the tragic to express the wavering nature of self.

My experiences as a drag queen active in gay culture and the effect of AIDS on my life influence my outlook on life, art, and the cosmos. Drag has always been for me a performative action of the street in real time and occasionally as a sanctioned performance. Drag, particularly in the realm of travesty, espouses a love of life in all its eccentricity, exuberance, splendor, and humor by tapping the thrust of adversity (most notably, but not exclusively, in regards to gender norms) and sailing into the stream of consciousness. One of the most precious gifts this experience has afforded me is a broadening of perceptions in how I regard the world and how others regard me. Foremost, that our interpretations of our culture, our existence, and ourselves are constantly fluctuating. This instability creates a vivacious environment that deserves embracing.

My initial illness and hospitalization due to HIV was cathartic. The effect was bodily and spiritual. It’s amazing how quickly one disregards material interests in dire situations. Love was the only thing that seemed worthwhile. Subsequently, the chains of victim hood ensnared me doggedly, perpetuated by a pharmaceutical regimen, and have proved the hardest bonds to break. At the end of the day, nobody wants to dance at a pity party, least of all the participants. Changing tunes makes the dance more lyrical; I like change. I approach drag braced by the cabaret motto, “Change outfits as often as possible.” I find this chameleon-like approach reflects my being and translates directly to my art making.

In The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin writes, “Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of self; in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be discerned. This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes.”

Victoria Fu was born in Los Angeles. She has degrees from Stanford (B.A.), USC (M.A., Art History), CalArts ( M.F.A. in Art), and also studied art at Oxford and at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. She has exhibited at El Museo de la Ciudad in Quito, Ecuador, REDCAT at Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, 2004 UCLA Wight Biennial, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Kunstraum Innsbruck in Austria, Royal College of Art in London and the Chelsea Museum of Art / Miotte Foundation, Frederieke Taylor Gallery in New York. Upcoming shows include Fundacion Sa Nostra in Palma de Mallorca and the Academy of Fine Art in Helsinki. A 2006 participant of the Whitney Independent Study Program, she was recently awarded artist-in-residency at Skowhegan and at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She currently lives and works in New York.

Statement of the artist:

My films are psychological tableaux of mood and atmosphere, at once intimate and estranged, formal and personal. Most of my pieces take the form of short, looped 16mm films (Convergence I, II and III, Kantstrasse, Arcosanti). Within the narratives, expressions of loss are embedded with the melancholy of a medium that has been pushed to near obsolescence. I work with an aesthetic of indifference, emptiness and absence; it at once hides and reveals nothing. I mute my protagonists and double them in order to cancel each other out. The films present characters and fictional time that simultaneously exist and don’t exist.

The characters in my films are like half-people or sleepwalkers; they maintain a presence onscreen but never fully emote, nor are they ever given any dialogue or score. Sets are stripped down and shots drawn out in order to underline a stillness that comes with simply watching images roll by on film. The pieces are rooted in tropes of cinema (i.e. build-up of dramatic tension, shot structure, traditional editing method), but they only appear in the guise of typical narrative feature films. These characters are held in endless loops; they are stuck in stories that have no distinct temporal direction; they travel without protagonistic motivation; they fail to react when dealt with traumatic situations like hitting an animal with a car. Installed, Convergence plays all three parts simultaneously. The characters intertwine, cancel each other out, reappear in other roles while the ambient soundtracks intermesh. Their malaise situates them between fictional existence and the brink of self-reflexivity (that they are just actors in front of a camera).

Self-Portrait in Sweden represents a body of work I have been building in the last two years, filming at new locations that I visit. They consist of invented home movies presenting vaguely historical objects and characters. In these pieces, the uncanny—or, in German, unheimlich (literally, "un-homely")—makes things “of the home” suddenly foreign or strange. The use of Super 8mm film evokes the home movie from a certain era, and these installations toy with the inherent nostalgia of that form—the sound of the projector, the domestic spaces, the sense of datedness.

In the original Self-Portrait, I present vestiges of the past and of places and people steeped in indications of rich histories: furnishings, old photographs, antiquated activities like badminton and picnicking. This sense of family history is all constructed. The characters pose as if they themselves are consciously abetting this feeling of history, and the deadpan doubling as if one of them is a phantom contributes to an air of alienation from the familiar. In installation form, Self-Portrait displays objects, and it is unsaid whether these are props, camera equipment and costumes for the film or if they are actually the authentic products of these people who have filmed themselves.

The relationship of film to photography, to the illusory picture plane from painting, to the surface of the canvas, is why I insist on locating the work within a visual arts discourse as opposed to strictly a film one. The "structuralist filmmaker" or the "conceptual artist": sometimes the questions are the same, but the relationships are not. I am interested in the “frame” of the photograph, the apparatus of creating the illusion of cinema, and the process of reception and the assumptions we bring as viewers to the process of receiving, translating film, photography, media, objects.