Future is Genderless
The Future is Genderless asks us to question and examine the way that gender is personally expressed right now, and how the future of gender can evolve. We are at this cultural inflection point where body autonomy and body rights are being brought to the forefront and being intertwined with the complexities of our other identities. Can we embrace the varied and individual expressions of one another and find ourselves accessing the humanity we need to not only accept ourselves but accept others as they are? This show features over 15 local community and student artists.
SHOW GUIDE MEET THE ARTISTS CURATOR NOTE
The show guide provides personal notes about each piece by the artist. While viewing the art, this list starts with the first piece on the left wall upon first entering the gallery, and rotates clockwise around the room.
- Heart / Anonymous
Heart is a personal story about growing up in a very conservative home where their queerness is not welcomed. - Self Portrait / Scott Larson
Self Portrait represents the amalgam of who the artist is as a person—a random mix of genes, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and life experiences during a brief period of time. - Growing / Scott Larson
Growing portrays the potential each of us has to learn, experience, overcome, and grow as human beings as we journey through life. - Duality / Scott Larson
Duality seeks to depict the duality of masculine and feminine qualities inherent in most of us. - Rook Howes / Breezy Winters
Rook (They/Their) is a pigment print capturing a coming of age and transition of sharing their identity with their parents before graduating from high school and leaving for college. - Clarity / Ellie Clute
Clarity is the opposite meaning of the sculpture Depersonalization. - Shadow / Victoria Desenberg
Shadow describes the artist's personal relationship with gender. While her gender is always performative, she isn't constantly conscious of it. It is an ingrained part of her existence, never separated, like a shadow. - Glitch / Victoria Desenberg
Glitch depicts the realization, celebration, and unknown future of gender. The photographs work together to illustrate the story of one's experience with gender. In this piece, gender becomes glitched and unclear, but only after being accepted in full color. Breaking gender norms, gender can be represented as anything in our future. - Depersonalization / Ellie Clute
Depersonalization shows a formless body as seen through an archway. It represents that feeling of looking through a mirror and not connecting to what looks back at you.
- Curiosity / Sloan Churches
Curiosity is aimed at promoting self-reflection into how one might express their gender and personality given the space to explore without judgment. - This Life / Sloan Churches
This Life attempts to capture the power of living intentionally and visibly, especially for those in marginalized communities. - Strangers / Sloan Churches
Strangers seeks to embody the uneasy feeling of separateness in one’s own body and in one’s sense of self. - Labels / Sloan Churches
Labels encourages us to think about how the labels we identify with hold us back, and what freedom from these superficial identifiers may feel like.
- Transmuting / Amie Pascal
Transmuting is a self-portrait that portrays the fluid and changing nature of identity and gender, always in progress and never fixed. - Monoecious / Kathleen Cooper and Bergen Bock
In monoecious plants, female and male flowers are separate, but are produced on the same plant. Thus, in the plant world, it is common and expected that an individual will not be restricted to a single gender only. Monoecious is the first collaboration between Kathleen Cooper and Bergen Bock. - Recipe for Fruit Salad / Matilda Joy Puccio
Recipe for Fruit Salad is a poem the artist wrote wrote about how simple acts of human existence can parallel one's own self-actualization. It seeks to re-contextualize the concept of garbage to be something that can be processed and turned into something deeply meaningful, useful, and life giving rather than simply rubbish to be tossed away and willfully forgotten and ignored. - The Behavior of Man / Nancy O'Toole
The Behavior of Man explores that moment when you are approaching your last breath in a hospital bed...your heartbeat slows, and the rhythm flattens...are you afraid...or are you at peace with what you left behind?
- Compound / Nacho Ruiz
Compound is a portrait using the skin tone of two people who are partners to show that they are similar to a scientific compound when two elements come together to form one. - Growth Not Perfection / Nacho Ruiz
Growth Not Perfection is a self portrait that shows all of the scars, tattoos, body hair, and stretch marks of the artist along with a rose to show that beautiful things can come from him. The wings represent the people who support and lift him up. - Self Portrait / Sara Weimers
Self Portrait explores the artist's vulnerability and strength in her own body. As someone who has always viewed themselves as fat, she was taught to be ashamed of her body, sexuality, and existence. This piece forced her to see herself in a way she never imagined. Her body has protected her, given life, given food, and caused men to weep. She doesn't believe that she is the weaker person. - Future is NonBinary / Sara Weimers
Future is NonBinary spells out the title of this piece in binary code as a secret message of le resistance to unite all the queer nerds who are out there. - Riot Girl / Sara Weimers
Riot Girl represents the artist's alter ego; the one who wants to burn it all down. As she smokes her joint, the look on her face is seductive, strong, and mysterious. Did she start the fire, or is she just enjoying watching it burn? - Dancing in the Moonlight / Nicky Gebhard
Dancing in the Moonlight captures a time under the stars where both immense joy and irreparable trauma coalesce and refract. - The Clothes I Wear to School / Nicky Gebhard
The Clothes I Wear to School is a comprehensive examination of how I feel in public places, where the distortion of my own thoughts and other people's judgments collide. - Left Half, Right Half / Nicky Gebhard
In Left Half, Right Half I explore the strain of striving for a better relationship between my personal life and my public life, which ultimately still have a disconnect. - Way of the Water / Kan Robinson
Way of Water shows how lonely, cold, and trapped one feels when a person's outward appearance doesn't and can't express who they are inside. - History / Kan Robinson
History represents the artist's physical embodiment of his understanding of himself and his gender from the past to the present. - Breakable / Kan Robinson
Breakable depicts a defaced man and woman, representing the breaking of all the expectations set before us in our gender identities by society. - Hate in the Eyes of Vanity / Ylva Wulfruna Lehtonen
A self portrait piece expressing the upset the artist felt when having to look at themselves in the mirror to do an assignment for an art class. Out of frustration, they did a full body nude self portrait. - Softness / Ylva Wulfruna Lehtonen
Softness captures the flow and shape of a trio of forms. - Swallow / Terry Gloeckler
A tiny piece of rebellion. - Hand over Heart / Terry Gloeckler
Hand Over Heart has a dual meaning - as a gesture of comfort, settling, safety when you place a hand upon your own or someone else's heart. And then the distorted belief of unworthiness where one hands over their own heart, and abandons themselves. - Blue / Bergen Bock
Blue depicts emotions surrounding gender, grief, and the shattering of the artist's belief system. The artist's fight with breast cancer and mother's passing forced them to confront things that they'd been suppressing all their life. Through this experience, they found freedom to explore and accept themselves with love and grace. - No Sir / Bergen Bock
No Sir aims to challenge assumptions and break down barriers around gender and stereotypes. The artist noticed a stark difference in behavior and treatment towards them after their double mastectomy, though nothing had really changed except their body. The artist hopes that a broader conversation and understanding can be obtained through their experience. - Sugar, Spice, & Everything Nice / Bergen Bock
Sugar, Spice, & Everything Nice encompass the past, present, and future of gender. The artist never wants their own children to mask and bury themselves the way that they did. - Mine, Not Yours / Bergen Bock
A play off an old nursery song that they sang at the preschool where the artist's daughter attended. Each individual's body and how they view and express themselves is 100% valid. - No Ceiling / Joseph Hart
No Ceiling interprets the hope that the artist gained from the honest, bare-bone conversations that he had with a friend. The conversations helped him believe that understanding each other is possible and the key to a better future. When people open up dialogue and can be honest, anything is possible. - Portrait of a Woman on Fire / Anna Elaine
Portrait of a Woman on Fire conveys the depravity and animalistic nature that underlies an otherwise feminine and unassuming outward appearance. She symbolizes the depths of rage and belittlement many women and femme identifying people feel for not being seen for anything other than their outward appearance. The fire of feminine creation burns hot. - Thank you? / Chelsea Sanford
Thank You? is a three layer hand sewn wall hanging quilt that focuses on the backhanded compliments that many women face daily. The artist used real quotes of un-sults from women in various communities they belonged to.