Anna Campbell

Participant Inc presents Anna Campbell, Dress Rehearsal for a Dream Sequence, a site-responsive sculptural installation and the most recent iteration of a cumulative body of dream sequences that began with Apparatus for a Dream Sequence (2018) and Prototype for a Dream Sequence(2020). Dress Rehearsal, like much of Campbell’s diverse research-based practice, employs props, scaffold, and trusswork to support models of representation for queer forms that challenge the gaze of classifying taxonomies. This critique bonded to the dreamwork of fantasy via form, space, and ephemera resists the social dynamics that reinforce our constructions of what may be understood as aspirational. Appropriated and abstracted references to domestic spaces, gay bars, and other more provisional architectures work to poach key signifiers of gender- and hetero-normativity and open them onto new attachments of possibility and desire from what might seem otherwise to be static and constrictive legacies.

The exhibition is accompanied by a broadside poster with a poem by Oliver Baez Bendorf and the publication, In the Glitter Mines, texts by Aaminah Shakur and Matt Morris — both printed by Issue Press.

Over the course of the exhibition, in cooperation with Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Second Year Curatorial Module, Dominika Tylcz, Hana Halilaj, Claire Sammut, Eugenia Braniff, and Sofia D’Amico will organize public programming comprised of a series of talks and a website that are envisioned to be closely interconnected through our digital platform Participant After Dark.