LIVING LIVE

The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center is pleased to present Living Live,an exhibition of contemporary art organized by David Louis Fierman and RJ Supa. The exhibition will take place throughout the building and aims to interrogate, activate, and complicate the space of the community center. The show features work by Andrea Bowers, Becky Brown, Alejandro Cesarco, Martin Soto Climent, Leidy Churchman, Christian Dietkus, Zackary Drucker, Debo Eilers, Josh Faught, Eve Fowler, Katy Grannan, Oliver Herring, Scott Hug, Kalup Linzy, Ryan McNamara, Robert Melee, Lucas Michael, Jack Pierson, A.L. Steiner, RJ Supa, and others.

Living Live deals with the distance between representation and lived experience, between what we live and what we are told is “live.” “Live” television is always actually slightly delayed for both technical reasons and to have the chance to edit content. When we watch a “live” performance we know that it is, for the most part, a rehearsed spectacle. Taken further, to be “live” is to be spontaneous, unpredictable, and take an active role in creating one’s life. This live-ness is always tempered by routine, by the reenactment of cultural tropes and performances, and the expectations put upon actions and people by others.

This concept has a special bearing in the queer community, always hanging in a sort of limbo between forging a new “live” identity and place and re-creating hegemonic social norms (see for example, the film Paris is Burning, in which documents its subjects creating a new, entirely “live” social performance out of cultural motifs such as supermodels, polo players, and the television show Dynasty). While the exhibition will feature queer artists, it takes aim at a larger goal: to reveal and explore the distance between what we live and what is imposed, between merely living and living “live.”

For more information on the exhibition please contact Ector Simpson
(ector@gaycenter.org [mailto:ector@gaycenter.org] ) or David Louis Fierman (Davidlouis@davidlouisfierman.com).