Bring Your Own Body
Transgender between Archives & Aesthetics
Art Forum
Cooper Union Gallery, NYC
About
Design and fabrication in collaboration with Charlotte Sims
Commissioned by Navild Acosta, this custom textile fabrication began with a vision and a voice brought to life through material. Working from their concept, Charlotte and I translated the idea into form through design, construction, and textile manipulation. The piece reflects a dialogue between artistic intention and material execution.
Cooper Union Gallery, New York City
Glass Curtain Gallery, Chicago
Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Philadelphia
“Niv Acosta’s Dickscape toes the line between playful and sinister. The dicks litter the space, big bulking denim behemoth’s riffing off where a dick generally lives (jeans) and the hilarious idea of sitting on a dick, of minimizing it, ignoring it, devaluing it while still valuing it. Almost as if to say, well when you put a dick that way why would I want one? Why wouldn’t I want one?
Acosta’s work stuck around in my mind for a while after seeing it as it alerted me to some things I’d already considered: what about having a dick is masculine and what kind of “authentic” man both does and does not have a dick? It seemed to be answering me who cares, sit down, it’s just a dick, anybody can make one as big or as small or as soft or as hard as they want. The modern man does not need a penis, but arguably he does need furniture.
BYOB ultimately poses this question: how can we self-define? It offers a tracing of intergenerational transgender space from representations in sexology and reflecting one’s inner-self outward to recognizing, through a variety of contemporary art practices, that all parts of the self exist (and do not exist) within that spectrum.”
Written by Rindon Johnson
BYOB is a curatorial exploration by Jean Vaccaro & Stamatina Gregory
Artists: Niv Acosta, Mark Aguhar, Math Bass, Effy Beth, Justin Vivian Bond, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Vaginal Davis, Zackary Drucker, Chloe Dzubilo, Juliana Huxtable, Greer Lankton, Pierre Molinier, Genesis P. Orridge, Flawless Sabrina, Buzz Slutzky, and Chris Vargas and the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art.
“Bring Your Own Body, presents the work of transgender artists and archives, from the institutional to the personal. Taking its title from an unpublished manuscript by intersex pioneer Lynn Harris, the exhibit historicizes the sexological and cultural imaginary of transgender through a curatorial exploration of the Kinsey Archives.
Simultaneously it presents contemporary transgender art and world making practices that contest existing archival narratives and construct new historical genealogies. While the exhibition gathers work under an expanded umbrella of transgender, it does so without identitarian claims.
Moving beyond the aesthetically defunct category of “identity politics” and the fraught gains of visibility, the artworks propose transgender as a set of aesthetics made manifest through multiple forms: paint, sculpture, textiles, film, digital collage, and performance.”
Written by Jean Vaccaro
