curated exhibition

Queer Sites and Sounds

We live in an age of rapid advancements in digital and new media technologies, an age where a tweet from Lady Gaga can be read simultaneously by her millions of followers globally in the blink of an eye. The mobility of digital imaging and viewing technologies—interfaced through smartphones, tablets, computers, and cameras—has opened the door for the masses to be both creators and consumers of digital images and texts. Social online platforms, chat rooms, and smartphone apps encourage new modes of social, political, and economic engagement as well as new opportunities for creative expressions. Indeed, the Internet, seemingly boundless in its sublime breadth, is replete with social and communal interactions and entanglements, some of which de-center or unsettle real-time or real-world social relations and expectations.  The Internet is thus a fruitful space for the multiplatform exhibition of Queer Sites and Sounds to exist, as the works curated on CA+T's website, alongside the organization's Tumblr and Pinterest websites, explore the possibilities of queer engagement across multiple virtual spaces and showcase queer new media and digital interventions.

 

Launched over the course of the first two months of 2014, Queer Sites and Sounds features digital artwork, videos, audio recordings, scholarship, and writing that question the ways that we think of "queer" as an embodied identity and "queer" as it relates to narrative and digital forms and digital literacies. That is, in Queer Sites and Sounds, “queer” is defined broadly to include non-heteronormative genders and sexualities in both Filipino and Western contexts (e.g., LGBTQ, bakla, and tomboy) as well as performativity and aesthetics (e.g.,  'kitsch,' 'spectacle,' and 'camp') that challenge and go beyond how Filipino bodies, affects, and processes are conventionally understood.

 

Unlike real-time, real-world exhibitions in which the works are revealed all at once and often in a singular space, the works in Queer Sites and Sounds unfold on CA+T's website in stages. Taken together, the works in Queer Sites and Sounds reveal the amazing possibilities of today's current digital and new media moment. The exhibition showcases queer expressive practices that dare us to look, read, and reflect.

 

Curator: Jan Christian Bernabe
January 2014

 

Featuring Work by
Eliza Barrios, Jeffrey Augustine Songco, Jan Padios, Kiam Marcelo Junio, Kat Larson, Laurel Fantauzzo, Ronaldo Wilson, Gina Osterloh, Jaime Woo, Patrick Henze (Patsy l'Amour laLove), and Miguel Libarnes.

 

 
Pinterest QSS Crowdsourcing Exhibition

 

Queer Sites and Sounds was made possible by the generous support of its sponsors.
For a full list of the sponsors, click here.

Mascara

Miguel Libarnes

2012 Video performance Duration: 3m 32s Material courtesy of the artist

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Miguel Libarnes

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Miguel Libarnes was born and raised in the Philippines. At the age of eighteen, he moved to the U.S.A. and studied visual arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He now resides in Brooklyn, New York. Focusing on his identity as a queer, Filipino surfer with a highly conservative Catholic upbringing, he aims to blend this mixture of conflicting cultures through art.
 

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  • Born: The Philippines
  • Based: Brooklyn, NY, USA

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Settle I

Miguel Libarnes

2012 Video installation Duration: 1m 23s Material courtesy of the artist

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Miguel Libarnes

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Miguel Libarnes was born and raised in the Philippines. At the age of eighteen, he moved to the U.S.A. and studied visual arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He now resides in Brooklyn, New York. Focusing on his identity as a queer, Filipino surfer with a highly conservative Catholic upbringing, he aims to blend this mixture of conflicting cultures through art.
 

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  • Born: The Philippines
  • Based: Brooklyn, NY, USA

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Prick, Prick, Prick

Gina Osterloh

2013 Video of performance Duration: 2m 15s Material courtesy of the artist

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Gina Osterloh

b. 1973

Gina Osterloh is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice embodies photography, film, performance, and drawing as a site for questions of visibility, perception, and being. Osterloh cites her experience of growing up mixed-race in Ohio as a set of formative experiences that led her to photography and larger questions of how a viewer perceives difference.  Her 2012 exhibition Anonymous Front, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, featured a documentary video essay on physical blindness, perception, and identity, created with the blind massage therapist cooperative in Manila, Philippines called New Vision. The foundations for this documentary project with New Vision was made possible by a Fulbright Research Grant in 2008. Other exhibitions include solo exhibitions Gina Osterloh at Higher Pictures; Slice, Strike, Make an X, Prick! at François Ghebaly Gallery; Nothing to See Here There Never Was at Silverlens Gallery; and group exhibitions Energy Charge: Connecting to Ana Mendieta at Arizona State University Museum, This is Not America: Resistance, Protest and Poetics at Arizona State University Museum, Demolition Women at the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University. Osterloh has exhibited internationally in places such as Hong Kong, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Indonesia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City. Her work has been reviewed in The New Yorker Magazine, Art in America, Art Forum Critic’s Pick, Hyphen Magazine, Art Asia Pacific, Asian Art News, Giant Robot, and KCET Artbound, among others.

 

Osterloh has taught courses and workshops in photography, video, and performance art at the University of California San Diego, CalArts, Otterbien University, California State University of Fullerton and Long Beach, and Santa Ana College to name a few.

location

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  • Born: Texas, USA
  • Based: Los Angeles, CA, USA
  • Also Based in: Ohio, USA

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Thea Quiray Tagle

b. 1982
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Born in New York and currently based in Oakland, Thea Quiray Tagle is a feminist scholar of visual culture and performance, Filipino American Studies and comparative ethnic studies, social movements, queer theory, and critical geography. She is completing her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego; her dissertation traces a cultural geography of Filipino/American labor migration to, settlement in, and displacement from, the San Francisco Bay Area in the 20th and 21st centuries. Thea is also a visiting faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she teaches courses in Critical Studies, Art History, and Humanities. Her two ongoing research projects explore, first, the politics and aesthetics of socially-engaged art practice in urban communities of color and, second, representations of terrorism and blackness in Filipino videos and popular performance.

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  • Born: New York, NY, USA
  • Based: Oakland, CA, USA

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Laurel Fantauzzo

b. 1984
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Laurel Fantauzzo is a writer and a teacher. Much of her work finds her studying appetites, identity, the signals for real love, and the search for home. She is largely a nonfiction writer and an essayist, but she also writes young adult fiction. 
 
Laurel Fantauzzo was born in Southern California to a Filipina mother and an Italian-American father. She later lived in Brooklyn, Manila, and Iowa City. She currently writes in Quezon City, Philippines, and she teaches at Ateneo de Manila University.

I am interested on how we construct our identities, how we maneuver displacement, how we communicate or fail to communicate, and how we can develop a healthy introspection as a platform for stronger, more active empathy.

location

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  • Born: Thousand Oaks, CA, USA
  • Based:
  • Also Based in: Brooklyn, NY, USA
    Iowa City, IA, USA
    Los Angeles, CA, USA
    Quezon City, Philippines

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Anonymous Front

Gina Osterloh

2010 Archival pigment print with UV laminate, mounted on dibond, with white frame Material courtesy of Gina Osterloh and François Ghebaly From Copy Flat series

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Gina Osterloh

b. 1973

Gina Osterloh is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice embodies photography, film, performance, and drawing as a site for questions of visibility, perception, and being. Osterloh cites her experience of growing up mixed-race in Ohio as a set of formative experiences that led her to photography and larger questions of how a viewer perceives difference.  Her 2012 exhibition Anonymous Front, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, featured a documentary video essay on physical blindness, perception, and identity, created with the blind massage therapist cooperative in Manila, Philippines called New Vision. The foundations for this documentary project with New Vision was made possible by a Fulbright Research Grant in 2008. Other exhibitions include solo exhibitions Gina Osterloh at Higher Pictures; Slice, Strike, Make an X, Prick! at François Ghebaly Gallery; Nothing to See Here There Never Was at Silverlens Gallery; and group exhibitions Energy Charge: Connecting to Ana Mendieta at Arizona State University Museum, This is Not America: Resistance, Protest and Poetics at Arizona State University Museum, Demolition Women at the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University. Osterloh has exhibited internationally in places such as Hong Kong, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Indonesia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City. Her work has been reviewed in The New Yorker Magazine, Art in America, Art Forum Critic’s Pick, Hyphen Magazine, Art Asia Pacific, Asian Art News, Giant Robot, and KCET Artbound, among others.

 

Osterloh has taught courses and workshops in photography, video, and performance art at the University of California San Diego, CalArts, Otterbien University, California State University of Fullerton and Long Beach, and Santa Ana College to name a few.

location

X
  • Born: Texas, USA
  • Based: Los Angeles, CA, USA
  • Also Based in: Ohio, USA

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Bruise Points and Infinite Pricks

Gina Osterloh

2010 Archival pigment print with UV laminate, mounted on dibond, with white frame Material courtesy of Gina Osterloh and François Ghebaly From the Copy Flat series

contributor

X

Gina Osterloh

b. 1973

Gina Osterloh is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice embodies photography, film, performance, and drawing as a site for questions of visibility, perception, and being. Osterloh cites her experience of growing up mixed-race in Ohio as a set of formative experiences that led her to photography and larger questions of how a viewer perceives difference.  Her 2012 exhibition Anonymous Front, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, featured a documentary video essay on physical blindness, perception, and identity, created with the blind massage therapist cooperative in Manila, Philippines called New Vision. The foundations for this documentary project with New Vision was made possible by a Fulbright Research Grant in 2008. Other exhibitions include solo exhibitions Gina Osterloh at Higher Pictures; Slice, Strike, Make an X, Prick! at François Ghebaly Gallery; Nothing to See Here There Never Was at Silverlens Gallery; and group exhibitions Energy Charge: Connecting to Ana Mendieta at Arizona State University Museum, This is Not America: Resistance, Protest and Poetics at Arizona State University Museum, Demolition Women at the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University. Osterloh has exhibited internationally in places such as Hong Kong, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Indonesia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City. Her work has been reviewed in The New Yorker Magazine, Art in America, Art Forum Critic’s Pick, Hyphen Magazine, Art Asia Pacific, Asian Art News, Giant Robot, and KCET Artbound, among others.

 

Osterloh has taught courses and workshops in photography, video, and performance art at the University of California San Diego, CalArts, Otterbien University, California State University of Fullerton and Long Beach, and Santa Ana College to name a few.

location

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  • Born: Texas, USA
  • Based: Los Angeles, CA, USA
  • Also Based in: Ohio, USA

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QR Series

Eliza Barrios

2010 Large scale projection Variable dimensions | video duration: 1m 46s Material courtesy of the artist

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Eliza Barrios

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Eliza O. Barrios, based in San Francisco, is an interdisciplinary artist. Working primarily in new media and site-specific installation, Barrios questions systems of belief by exploring various processes of self-reflection. Barrios holds a Bachelor of Arts from San Francisco State University and a Masters of Fine Arts from Mills College.

Barrios' work has been exhibited at museums, new media and film festivals internationally and domestically, including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Oahu, Hawaii), Mag:Net: Gallery - Katinpunan (Manila, Philippines), Intersection for the Arts (San Francisco, CA), Optica Festival (Gijón, Spain), New Forms Festival (Vancouver, Canada) and the International Turin Gay & Lesbian Film Festival (Turin, Italy). She has received an Honorary Fellowship from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and has served as Juror for Alliance of Artists Communities' Visions From New California Fellowship.

Barrios is also part of Mail Order Brides/M.O.B (with Jenifer Wofford and Reanne A. Estrada). Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. have been scheming, entertaining and creating together for over fifteen years. Their work ranges from video, performative to public art. Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. have shown in various musuems, galleries and film festivals including the DeYoung Museum (San Francisco, CA), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA), the Mix Festival (New York, NY), SF International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (San Francisco CA) and the Luggage Store Gallery (San Francisco, CA).

location

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  • Born: San Diego, CA, USA
  • Based: San Francisco, CA, USA

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