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LUIS DE
JESUS LOS ANGELES
VOLTA
NY 2012
Booth
V-13
ZACKARY DRUCKER : Gold
Standard
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is
very pleased to announce our participation in VOLTA NY
2012 with a solo presentation of works by LA-based
photographer, video and performance artist ZACKARY
DRUCKER, titled Gold
Standard. The fifth edition of VOLTA NY
will take place from Thursday, March 8 through Sunday, March
11, 2012, at 7 West 34th Street, 11th Floor, in
Manhattan. A VIP preview and Vernissage will be held on
Thursday, March 8th.
Zackary Drucker
Don’t Look at Me Like That
in
collaboration with Manuel Vason
Duratrans, lightbox, 94 x72 x 8 cm / 37 x 28 x 3 in, edition of
3.
Drawing from feminist and queer theoretical
discourse, Zackary Drucker combines intensely personal
narrative with historical investigations in works that address
sexual exploitation, transgender representation, and drag
performance, and explore relationships that facilitate
queer/countercultural lineage. A transgender artist
whose work often celebrates and amplifies the viewer’s
inability to affix easy norms and codes, Drucker is among the
leading participants in a new generation that is employing
performance as a space for creative revolt and
self-expression. Interested in “obliterating language
obstacles, pulverizing identity disorders and revealing dark
subconscious layers of outsider agency”, she disarms audiences
using film, video, photography, text and live performance, and
reinvents and redistributes traditionally-held binary formulas
and power relationships between spectacle and voyeur,
dominator and subjugated, and the domesticated and the
exoticized. This sense of duality has come to represent
Drucker: her nuanced complex works, frequently produced in
creative partnerships, explode normative roles of femininity
while offering a direct, unapologetic confrontation between
the audience and her body, gender, and voice.
Zackary Drucker
This
is the Way I Want to Remember You
in
collaboration with Manuel Vason
Duratrans, lightbox, 94 x72 x 8 cm / 37 x 28 x 3
in, edition of 3.
At
the center of the installation, inside a small room with a
gold-lined interior, will be a presentation of Drucker’s
seminal videos Lost Lake and
You will never, ever be a woman. You must live the
rest of your days entirely as a man, and you will only get
more masculine with each passing year. There is no way
out. Drucker’s videos and performances
feature a carefully edited and scripted historical queer
vernacular known as “reading”, a powerful sub-cultural dialect
of resistance that appropriates the demeaning and homophobic
language of the “straight” world. In what may sound
cryptic, unintelligible or belligerent to an unfamiliar
audience, the artist uses her own body and those of others in
works that feature emotional rants, dispassionate narratives
and autobiographical manifestos that construct, deconstruct,
and celebrate self-representation. A lost technique of
verbal assaults known to a past generation of drag queens, the
seemingly belligerent slurs in a “read” uncomfortably place
the viewer at the edge of a forgotten and alienating language
while simultaneously addressing the artist's cultural and
political position as a self-identified woman.
Zackary Drucker
You
will never, ever be a woman. You must live the rest of your
days entirely as a man, and you will only get more masculine
with each passing year. There is no way out
in
collaboration with Van Barnes
DVD,
color, 8:45, edition of 5.
In
You will never, ever be a woman...,
two trans women, apparent lovers, lounge in a sun-filled
apartment while exchanging verbal barbs that oscillate from
hateful to loving, blurring the distinction between lover and
enemy. To the casual observer the heightened exchange
would simply register as a contentious fight, but Drucker
succinctly utilizes the most devastating aspect of reading:
the insult. The contrast between the apparently abrasive
language and the peaceful setting mirrors a strained
solidarity between the women, a bond of sisterhood fraught
with tension. Like warrior/lovers in ancient Greece -
couples united in battle against hostile forces - these women
are, by sparring verbally, bracing themselves against the
attacks historically encountered by those of transgender
identities, and in so doing fortifying their own authentic
sense of self.
Zackary Drucker
Lost
Lake
in
collaboration with A.L. Steiner, Van Barnes, and Rhys
Ernst
DVD,
color, sound, 8:00, edition of 5.
Filmed at the peak of autumn foliage in a rural
Midwestern US locale, Lost Lake -
produced in collaboration with A.L. Steiner, and winner of the
Best New Visions award at the 2011 San Francisco International
Film Festival - posits beauty and fear as inextricable from
the psyche of the American landscape. Featuring a
transsexual, pervert-hunting vigilante, Lost Lake’s
contemplative moments and stunning vistas are jarringly
punctuated with the vocabularies of witch-hunts, hate crimes
and psychological violence. Accompanying the videos in
the same space will be four light boxes from the series
Don’t Look At Me Like That, a
collaboration with London-based photographer Manual Vason,
which employ a range of house-hold props and tableaus that
strive toward the portrayal of bodily identity, infused with
acute, masochistic emotional compulsions.
Zackary Drucker
Distance is where the heart is, home is where
you hang your heart, #13
in
collaboration with Amos Mac, 2011
archival
digital pigment print, 91 x 137 cm / 36 x 54 in, edition of
3.
Also
on view in the booth will be photographs from
Distance is where the heart is, home is where you
hang your heart. Executed over a long,
snowed-in weekend at Drucker's childhood home in Syracuse, New
York, the images combine elements of personal history,
performance documentation, and exhibitionism. The
resulting intervention is also an experiment in cross-identity
representation; a dialogue between Drucker, a trans woman, and
Amos Mac, a trans man, with whom she collaborated.
Distance... explores the
relationship between spectacle and voyeur as uniquely removed
from the trappings of representational asymmetry.
Veering between classically sleek fashion editorials to
the sexed-up fetishism of Pierre Molinere, the site-specific
body works of Ana Mendieta, and the transgressive
body-as-target performances of Chris Burden, the photo essay
imagines a stratagem where difference is grated into a fine
dust settling over the ruins of normativity. Devoid of
traditional male-female power dynamics, Drucker and Mac’s
mutual kinship as trans people results in a visual
free-for-all that plays with sexuality, female subjection,
power, wealth, vulnerability, victimization, family, comfort,
safety, secrets - a perfect balance of voyeur and
aesthete.
Zackary Drucker earned an MFA from the California
Institute of the Arts in 2007 and a BFA from the School of
Visual Arts in 2005. She has performed and exhibited her work
internationally in venues including the 54th Venice Biennale
(Swiss Off-Site Pavilion); Curtat Tunnel, Lausanne,
Switzerland; L.u.c.c.a. Museum of Contemporary Art, Lucca,
Italy; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; The Hammer
Museum, Los Angeles; Tromso Kunstaforening, Tromso, Norway;
Horse Hospital, London, UK; REDCAT and LACE, both in Los
Angeles; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; X
Initiative, New York, NY; Les Recontres Internationales,
Paris/Berlin/Madrid; Gender Bender Festival, Bologna, Italy;
and Mix Fest, New York, among others. Drucker is the
recipient of a 2009 California Community Foundation (CCF)
Emerging Artist Fellowship, funded by the Getty Trust; a 2009
Art Matters Foundation Grant; and a 2009 Franklin Furnace Fund
Grant. She is represented by Luis De Jesus Los
Angeles.
The
Gallery wishes to gratefully acknowledge the following sources
that were referenced in this announcement: Christopher Bollen,
Interview Magazine; Danny Jauregui, Art in America; Michelle
Tea, The Huffington Post; Irene Tsatsos and the California
Community Foundation.
For further information on Zackary Drucker and
her works, please contact the Gallery at +1 310-838-6000, or
email: gallery@luisdejesus.com.
For information on VOLTA NY
2012, please check out voltashow.com.
VOLTA NY:
Previews:
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Guest of
Honor: 11 am - 2 pm (with VOLTA NY Preview
Invitation)
VIP /
Press: 12 - 2 pm (with VOLTA NY or The Armory Show VIP
Card)
General Opening:
Thursday, March
8, 2012, 2 - 7 pm
Public Hours:
Friday,
March 9 – Sunday, March 11, 2011
11 am -
7 pm
LUIS DE JESUS LOS
ANGELES
2685 S.
La Cienega Boulevard
Los
Angeles, CA 90034 USA
+1 310
838 6000
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