Interiors

Kalup Linzy

Aza

P. Jones

Housing is pleased to present Interiors, a group exhibition featuring video work.

The oblong burn caused by a curlinging iron brushing against one’s inner wrist while styling a wig; a far away speaker singing out “pussy, pussy, pussy, pussy, pussy pussy, ooo;” a sink full of dirty makeup brushes, caked with eyeshadow and foundation; an unmade bed. These are some of the intimate, domestic symbols of queer life: the unremarkable, everday scenes that get passed up–or, in the case of something like the burn, deliberately covered up–in favor of the more consumable moments of queer fabulosity and fierceness. But these quieter, more private moments reveal a certain queer joy, practices of survival, self-fashioning, and self-love, that escape commodification. That is to say, these quotidian moments of queernes that happen in bedrooms and bathrooms and living rooms, celebrate a different kind of queer pride, a queer pride that perhaps slips through the claws of rainbow capitalism that today maintain such a firm grasp on the month of June.

Interiors is a video show that revels in such interior moments of queer domesticity. And just as the situations depicted in these videos refuse capitalist expectations of queerness that have white-washed pride, this exhibition specifically recognizes the role that Black queers have played in shaping queer culture and the gay rights movement. Present throughout this exhibition is a firm sense of the omnichronous quality of Black queer life, as it extends through the past and present shaping our histories and our futures. The videos in this exhibition unpack the ways in which domestic life takes on new meaning for those who are frequently and systematically displaced from their homes for their minoritarian identities: be it that they have been kicked out by their blood families due to their gender or sexual identitiy or by racist and classist state-sanctioned practices such as colonization and redlining. In this way, Interiors also pays homage to Housing’s first exhibition at 191 Henry Street, Hard Opening: Vigil for Black Death, which featured video work by artists dissenting against the unjust deaths caused by systemic racism and the models by which marginalized people–namely Black people–are exploited for capital. Like Hard Opening, Interiors will feature only one screen against which all the films are projected, one after another.

However, domesticity also takes on a stylistic meaning in this exhibition through hallmark DIY aesthetics that resonate across the featured video works. Playing with bricolage and the simulacrum, each artists denaturalizes gender, sexuality, and identity at large. For example, Kalup Linzy’s Conversations Wit de Churen II, braids together vignettes surrounding the fictional Braswell family following the form of melodramatic soap operas. Shot in the artist’s own home with shake-and-go wigs, Linzy manages to unearth an emotional rawness and situational realness in their use of camp and fantasy. At the same time, Linzy uses this series to posit poignant critiques of the art world and mainstream media. On the other hand, Aza’s chemtrails invites audiences to become voyeurs of the most ordinary moments of the artist’s life. Aza makes us feel like intruders as we read their dream journal, watch them eat in the bath, and observe them take out their contacts at the end of a long night. Juxtaposing sensual moments with more mundane experiences in this way, Aza explores how memories inform their body while begging an important question: in what ways are these ordinary, instantaneous moments just as (if not more) illicit and private than more suggestive images? Finally, P. Jones presents a compilation video featuring snippets by queer Black creatives from TikTok and YouTube. Piecing together snapshots of creators doing their hair and make-up, retelling episodes of reality shows, and dancing in their living room, the montage captures these creators in states of euphoria, boredom, preparation, and critique. There’s also a home-video feel to the piece, particularly in the way it privileges a certain very queer lack of virtuosity and delights in the digital democratization of filmmaking. But at it’s core is a very tender appreciation and celebration of these minute, domestic moments of Black queer becoming and self-making.

Aza is a performance and visual artist and co-conspirator at No Nation Tangential Unspace Lab. This coalescence is one to galavant in dreamscapes, ancestral juke joints, chaturbate masturbation web temples, fish tanks, and the Heartspace. They organize Smudge Cinema Project, a now-and-then screening series that takes a look at what happens when a film is projected on a wall for people to watch.

Kalup Linzy thematically explores sexuality, gender stereotypes, cultural identities, and his childhood upbringing through soap opera based video and performance works. His videos are characteristically hyperbolic and gritty, often low-tech in quality with plots calling on socialization and community. Linzy pushes gender boundaries by adorning himself and his subjects in drag, manipulating the voice, and inserting a familiar cultural vernacular into his dialogues. Each of his characters include an extensively mapped background, layered and linked together with the others to create a family tree.

Kalup Linzy was born in Florida and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Kalup Linzy’s recent solo exhibitions include Sundance Film Festival, Park City, UT; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and LAX ART, Los Angeles, CA, among others. Recent group shows include The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and MoMA P.S. 1, Long Island City, NY, among others. Linzy has had multiple performances and screenings including the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Kitchen, New York, NY; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA, among many others. He has been honored with awards and grants including The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, The Creative Capital Foundation grant, The Art Matters grant, The Jerome Foundation grant, The Harpo Foundation grant, and The Headlands Alumni Award residency. Among Linzy’s works in permanent collections are The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and The Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL. Recent press includes The New York Times, Artnet News, Artnewspaper, and The Guardian among numerous others.

P. Jones (b. 1864) is an anonymous collective of black queer artists & activists. Accumulation of former Yale and Columbia graduates.