Queer Voice
April 22 - August 1, 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 22 @ 6-8 pm
Exhibition walkthrough with Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner:
Thursday, April 22 @ 5 pm, ICA members only
Presenting video, installation, and audio works, this group exhibition foregrounds the voice as a material in contemporary art—in particular, a queered voice. Manipulated, mediated, or otherwise affected, the voice present in these works both signals a disengagement with gender norms and with everyday conventions of communication. Casting light on what it means to "sound strange," they insist that the viewer become a listener too, engaging with art works that are performative and narrative in nature. Throughout the voice takes on a complex of guises and strategies: it can mask the speaker, tweak identity, obscure gender, test points of view, amplify and nullify emotions. It may create a disembodied or virtual presence, filling the listening space with avatars and mediums, the very presence of which signal a shift in the nature of reality itself. The queer voice opens up a queer space where a heightened sense of artifice and affect signal a new norm.
Conducted more as an investigation than survey, this exhibition focuses on the work of seven artists across three generations. Starting the 1960s, when new technology first popularized audio tape recording, and moving into the present, when the strangeness of hearing one's own voice is increasingly part of internet and digital culture, it draws out a cross-generational conversation around queer identity and non-oppositional representations of gender, in which male and female attributes coexist in a subjective voice.
Artists: Laurie Anderson, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Sharon Hayes, John Kelly, Kalup Linzy, Jack Smith, Ryan Trecartin and Andy Warhol.
In response to an invitation to "describe the queer voice," artists
Hear the recent program "The Vocoder: From Speech-Scrambling to Robot Rock that aired on NPR's Morning Edition (May 13, 2010).
This exhibition is organized by Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner, and will be accompanied by a catalog publication. This is the first ICA catalog produced in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania's year-long seminar, "Writing Through Art and Literature: Transcribing the Wor(l)d," a course collaboratively hosted by ICA and the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW). To amplify the emphasis on listening, works are represented through transcriptions, prepared according to a set of established conventions by students at Penn. Artists’ scripts, when used, are also represented. The catalog features a compendium of texts, with over eighty contributors, written in response to the question: “Describe the Queer Voice.”$15
RELATED PROGRAMS
THURSDAY, APRIL 22, 5PM
EXHIBITION WALKTHROUGH (ICA MEMBERS ONLY)
With exhibition curator Ingrid Schaffner
WHENEVER WEDNESDAY, APRIL 28, 6:30 PM
CONVERSATION & SCREENING: RYAN TRECARTIN + LIZZIE FITCH
Join in a conversation with the artists, led by ICA student advisory board members. This program is funded by an “Arts & the City Year”grant from the Provost’s Office.
WHENEVER WEDNESDAY, JUNE 23, 6:30 PM
SCREENING/SALON/CABARET/DISCO
Experience works and appearances by John Kelly, Kalup Linzy, and others, and an evening of video curated by Sarvia Jasso.
Sarvia Jasso is an independent curator, and co-founder of Brooklyn is Burning (BiB), a video and performance event that was produced at various locations from 2008-2010. She was a curatorial fellow at The Kitchen and has organized exhibitions and events in New York and California.
We are grateful for funding for this exhibition from Toby Devan Lewis and the
Edna W. Andrade Fund of The Philadelphia Foundation for the exhibition and
the Office of the Provost at the University of Pennsylvania for the publication.
ICA gratefully acknowledges the generous support of donors to our
campaign: Endowment gifts - Dorothy A. Weber & Stephen R. Weber
Endowment Fund; Nancy E. & Leonard M. Amoroso Exhibition Endowment
Fund; Dorothy H. & Martin N. Bandier Endowment Fund; Cheri S. & Steven M.
Friedman Endowment Fund; Pamela Sanders C'78 Exhibition Endowment
Fund established by The Jerry & Emily Spiegel Family Foundation, Inc.; Lurie
Family Foundation; and Lawrence S. Reichlin. Term gifts - Wendy Kirsh
Fisher Fund; Bryan and Meredith Verona Fund. Additional funding has been
provided by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; The Dietrich Foundation, Inc.; the
Overseers Board for the Institute of Contemporary Art; friends and members
of ICA; and the University of Pennsylvania.
(Info as of 3/12/10)
images from top to bottom: Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Masters of None, 2006, video, duration 11 minutes, 37 seconds. Courtesy the artists and Elizabeth Dee, New York. Kalup Linzy, still from Conversations wit de Churen V: As da Art World Might Turn, 2006, DVD, color, sound, TRT: 11 minutes, 16 seconds. Courtesy the artist and Taxter & Spengemann, New York.John Kelly (photo: John Dugdale).
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