July 11-27, 2019

Hours: Thu-Sun, 1-6PM

​

Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition co-curated by Mary Gagler and Lorenzo Triburgo. An opening reception will be held on Friday, July 12 from 7-9 PM at the gallery’s location at 56 Bogart Street in Brooklyn, NY. A closing performance event will be held on Friday, July 26, 7-8:30 PM.

 

The artworks in CRIMINALIZE THIS! explore gender policing in its wide range of expressions—from tacit to overt, banal to insidious, simply irritating to systemically violent. The approaches and mediums are varied. In sculpture, painting, photography, video, mixed media we glimpse camp, irony, performance, and the abstracted self. There is also a notable brightness to many of the pieces in the show, reminding viewers that resistance is quite often fabulous.

​

The artists whose work is on view range from emerging to established. Included artists responded to an international call for art on the theme of gender policing and the criminalization of queerness. Works were chosen for their nuanced perspective on the theme. In order to deepen the conversation, a number of artists were invited to exhibit and form the conceptual foundation of the exhibit. 

​

In Gabriel Garcia Roman’s Dorian, from the series, Queer Icons, the artist employs a chine-colle technique to the photogravure process to create one-of-a-kind prints. The resulting aesthetic elevates the queer figure to saintly status, inspiring idolation, and inviting the viewer to bask in the refuge of a new, queer, iconography. 

​

Julie Green’s First Meal for Kristine Bunch raises questions about the reasons women are the largest growing population in the U.S. prison system. In a new collaboration with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern, Green illustrates meals of exonerees after release from prison. First Meal for Kristine Bunch was created for Bunch who was wrongfully convicted for murder of her son and spent 16 years in prison. 

​

As the first Russian to be granted political asylum in the U.S. on the grounds of homophobic persecution, Slava Mogutin’s radical artworks are informed by his bicultural dissident and refugee experience. In two pieces from his most experimental body of work to date, Young Blood Open Heart, Mogutin combines photo collage with bodily fluids, rust, wine, vinegar, lime, beet juice and vaginal cream.

In Marc Ohrem-Leclef’s Jugaad/Of Love and Intimacy and Rafael Soldi’s Cargamontón ambiguous physical gestures between men and boys form tensions both beautiful and alarming.   

In Cargamontón Rafael Soldi explores boyhood assertions of power in the form of homoerotic desire masked as violence. Reflecting on his experience as a queer youth in an all-boys Catholic school in Peru, Soldi obscures and degrades found footage of violent rites performed by school boys. The resulting images conjure an aesthetics of surveillance, not in the least due to the contextual information that is missing and for which the viewer is left to question whether they are seeing torture, pleasure, or both. 

For his ongoing project, Jugaad/Of Love and Intimacy, Marc Ohrem-Leclef has created photographs and interviews with over 100 people from different backgrounds and identities in territories throughout India. Ohrem-Leclef’s images with their accompanying text explore the impact of colonial masculinities on traditionally fluid notions of gender and sexuality.

Brittany Knapp is an activist, artist and survivor of incarceration and sexual violence  as a youth. In Undue Process and No Real Harm Done, Knapp employs wood burning to create figurative recreations of a space where trauma occurred. The artworks are at once dreamlike and forthright, achieving Knapp’s intentions of inspiring viewers to seek social justice by way of compassion.

Guy Woodard is a former master forger whose time in prison led directly to developing ballpoint pen as his fine art medium. The nude figure in combat boots suggests a moment of personal freedom, agency, and peace in Woodard’s signature maxi-minimalist style where the viewer completes the missing lines in the work. Pastor Isaac Scott is a formerly incarcerated activist and artist whose works actively promote prison abolition. As Program Director for “The Confined Arts” Scott is a leader in harnessing the power of the arts in the service of human rights.

Peter Clough and Marval Rex deliver us to the realm of fantasy and dissolve the limits of the human body with criticality and camp. Both artists revel in the uncanny space of a multitudinous self and desires mediated by lens, machine, bondage, and infrastructure. 

Connections between the direct and indirect consequences of gender policing among the artworks in CRIMINALIZE THIS! demonstrate the scaffolding that ultimately supports oppression on a grand scale. For the duration of this show, the gallery is a site for persistence, desire, and the community of resistance.  

​

Featuring works by: Maryamsadat Amirvaghefi, Garth Amundson & Pierre Gour, Kyle Anderson, David Andersson, Elise Askonas, Nomi Beesen, Laura Boban, Julia Bradshaw, Jessica Burke, Keith Buswell, Mack Carlisle, Deric Carner, William Chambers, Sarawut Chutiwongpeti, Mia Cinelli, Peter Clough, Mary Cobb, Robyn Day, Jesse Egner, Jason Elizondo, James Falciano, Jon Feinstein, Lila Freeman, Guta Galli & Aaron Wilder, Ebenezer Galluzzo, Nicole Gamboa, Lindsay Garcia, Robert Gordon, Julie Green, Rebecca Hackemann, Ryan Halliwill, Vanessa Haney, James Horner, J Houston, Rainn Jackson, Axel Jenson, Everett Kane, Ann Kaplan, Brittany Knapp, Vaughan Larsen, Christopher Lineberry, Billi London-Gray, Jordan McGirk, Charlie J. Meyers, Sara Minsky, Slava Mogutin, Andrew Norris, Marc Ohrem-Leclef, Stephanie Paine, Julie Rae Powers, Vick Quezada, Kyle Quinn, Rowan Renee, Marval Rex, Gabriel Garcia Roman, Alex Dolores Salerno & Francisco Eraso Jr., Benjamin Saulnier, Pastor Isaac Scott, Rafael Soldi, Clark Stoeckley, Billie Stultz, Rebecca Jean Sutton, Ilona Szwarc, June T Sanders, Britt Thomas, Alan Vincent, Jan Wandrag, Sadie Wechsler, Kaylee Weyrauch, Milo Wissig, Guy Woodard, and Xue Zheng.

 

Mary Gagler is a Brooklyn-based independent curator and director of Amos Eno Gallery.
 

Lorenzo Triburgo is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist, activist, and educator whose practice encompasses performance, photography, video and audio.

​

Image by featured artist: Slava Mogutin, That’s Me In the Corner (Everybody Hurts), 2016. Blood and red wine on optic C-print, 16 x 20 in.