June 21 – 29, 2006
The Pride Art Collective: Carol Camper, Adam Cheung, Barb Taylor Coyle
Carol Camper
Carol Camper’s paintings explore the body as the site of all experience. The body though finite, permits unlimited possibility. Her personal experience as a racially mixed, queer Black woman has enabled her to embrace hybridity, fluidity and plurality. To be one thing does not mean you cannot also be another. She resists a hierarchy that insists the spiritual is loftier than the corporeal. The body, too, can be transcendent. Carol often depicts this transcendence with the use of golden halos, painted around her figures whether they are angels or ordinary people. She calls her belief, her mission – Corporealism.
Barb Taylor Coyle
Barb Taylor Coyle’s work will include a series of sculptures similar to the examples on the CD. This new series will focus on the theme human form and the queer gaze. In these pieces women will be seen in a variety of roles – loved and lover, caregiver, player, worker – roles changing and merging. Historically women are subject in the work of sculptors such as Rodin and Moore. In Barb’s work, lesbian couples are the focus – human form from a queer perspective – the pulsating rhythms of joy, sorrow and love – the interaction of two women. This human form is not idealized – it focuses on middle-age women, their curves worked by time and labour, femininity possibly not their main concern. The sculptures will be a mix of reality merging with stylized graphics originating in ancient art. The sculptures for this show will be approximately 18x6x6” and carved from local woods such as walnut, butternut and cherry.
Aries Cheung
Titled Photographing Fairies, Aries’ recent series of paintings explore how the single male (nude) figures stand up to the gazers’ scrutiny as beings and objects of sexual desire in the absence of sex.
The title is borrowed from a novel of the same title. The novel is about the fascination of capturing the images of fairies by photographs in the late Victorian and the turn of the century. The fairies in photographs produced in the intention to prove the existence of fairies often turned out as nothing but some conspicuous, ambiguous, blurry specks of lights and shadows. Aries uses such “ephemeral” quality of the fairy images as a metaphor for the constructed “absence” or “endangered presence” of contemporary gayness. As a queer man, Aries is amused and inspired by the gay males’ tireless effort to capture any glimpses of gay sexuality through the representation of the male gender.
