DOWN SOUTH
This series acts as an object-based extension of my current research on the emerging genre of Queer Abstraction.
Inspired by books like The Un-Natural State: Arkansas and the Queer South and Men Like That: A Southern Queer History, Instagram accounts such as @truckslutsmag and @queerappalachia, and my own upbringing in rural Arkansas, this series seeks to convey the richness of southern and rural LGBT+ identities through the reference of multiple and sometimes conflicting visual referents. The combination or contrast of everyday objects address gender and sexuality, but also class and the rural. As discussed by J. Halberstam in A Queer Time and Place, queer is usually associated with the metropolitan. When considering rural queerness, figures such as Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena evoke a sense that the rural is hostile and opposed to queerness. These pieces however subvert strong Southern gender norms through the evoking of the queer bodily in witty and unusual ways to depict another view of the rural which is queer resistance and ingenuity.
