By Erin Hurley and Max Orr
The current show on display at Kittredge Gallery, “subGrid,” explores themes such as identity, expression and growth through the lens of queer artists residing in the Pacific Northwest. The gallery, curated by Professor Mare Hirsch, features work from six artists and includes digital, physical and hybrid media. Regarding her recent foray into exploring aspects of her own identity, Hirsch explains, “I used to sort of have it where I am queer, and then I made my work engaged with all these other ideas about science and data but over this past year, I’ve started to make work that more directly engages with my own queerness and the themes that came about with that.” She wanted the whole exhibition to be focused on the ways other artists explore themes around their own queerness in different manners and mediums.
When entering into the space, visitors are visually and aurally guided to the side room, where Hirsch’s own contribution is decisively displayed. Boxy orange lights decorate the space in a whimsical yet structural way. Hirsch’s display, “Transition Networks,” is a “generative light installation that explores the complexity and unpredictability of the trans experience, specifically focusing on the process of transitioning,” she said. An elaborate software governs the enticing warm LEDs and immersive clicking sounds, generating an unpredictable exhibition that offers “a moment to reflect on the mechanics of transition and the broader implications of how we understand identity, change and connection.” Visitors are invited to participate in the evocative experience through the placement of a bench underneath the web of lights and cords.
In the main hall of the gallery, five other works are displayed across the space. The artists are members of the queer community that Hirsch connected with when she had originally moved to the Pacific Northwest. “As I was thinking about artists to include, I wanted to make sure that there’s a variety of perspectives on queerness and people coming from at it from different angles, whether that’s their own identity, so whether they’re trans or not, or whether they’re Black or not, or whether they come from different cultural backgrounds that have different relationships to queerness as well,” Hirsch said.
The artists’ identities and mediums are diverse. A television and headphones stand in the corner, inviting viewers to watch and listen to Meysha Harville’s powerful and creative storytelling. They masterfully blend spoken word poetry with audio and visual media to explore Black trans joy, righteous anger, power and identity in their art. The television repeats short distorted videos of Harville moving through the world, while the headphones play their spoken word poetry. The audio is purposefully glitchy, featuring intermittent technological defects like pauses and stutters. Despite these “setbacks,” Harvilles actual and metaphorical voice comes through strongly, demonstrating their perseverance and transformation through lived experiences.
As viewers move around the gallery, they witness works from two different printmakers, Cas Almond (‘24) and Aim Ren Beland. Both artists explore the trans experience but utilize different materials that tackle different subthemes. Almond examines his five years of transition from female to male through the dual use of images of his body and depictions of the natural world to convey that trans bodies are natural. In a statement, Almond explains that, “this work represents five years of my life. Five years of hormones. Five years of becoming. Five years of remaking my body and self. This process could not be represented by a single printmaking technique, so I did not limit myself to one.”
Beland uses cost-effective and accessible risograph zines to discuss the act of medically transitioning and communicate internal experience with the external world. His illustrations feature vibrant colors and witty humor while creatively addressing hardship and struggle.
Another artist, Aster Olsen, further explores the layered trans experience in her piece, “Records from the Alabastion Dominion Federal Archives.” She combines her trans identity with her background in ecology and microbiology to demonstrate how Western society’s obsession with observation and interpretation reinforces normality and limits the ability to comprehend the alien. This is showcased through clever writings and beautiful pieces of the Mandelbrot set, a complex mathematical graph.
The last installation is a digital piece by Sadaf Sadri, a Seattle-based Iranian artist who explores disruption and defiance in their piece “Legacy.” The moving graphic is projected across the right side wall in the gallery. The piece features prominent Islamic religious motifs and other more personal iconographies to proclaim freedom from patriarchal and authoritative systems.
Overall, “subGrid” is a provocative exhibition that defies the status quo by placing queer artists and their identities at the forefront of new media. Hirsch hopes that students will be able to see that “you can find queerness in so many different places.” The inclusion of both digital, physical and hybrid media shows that there is space for all types of artists in the industry. “subGrid” will be on display in Kittredge Art Gallery until Dec. 14, 2024.