Nayland Blake Retrospective

The art of Nayland Blake offers one of the most pressing meditations on — and invitations to interrogate — the circulation of pain in contemporary American life. A retrospective of their work at the new Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, one of the largest recent exhibits for the artist on this coast, foregrounds such an invitation by showcasing Blake’s frequent use of bondage equipment, chains, images, and video of discomfort and pain, and periodic gruesome glimpses of self- and other-inflicted suffering.

Check out the full review: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/getting-hard-with-nayland-blake-on-the-artists-recent-retrospective-in-los-angeles/

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Getting Hard with Nayland Blake

Getting Nerdy

A podcast episode of THE IMAGINATION DESK, in which I talk with Joey Eschrich of the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination.  We take a closer look at popular modern Science Fiction TV shows and their cultural and political uses, along with a look at writing stories in the digital age.

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EASTSIDERS and Kit Williamson

My interview with Kit Williamson, creator of the hit series EASTSIDERS, in which Kit talks about representation as politics and the importance of being unapologetically queer …

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/unapologetically-queer-kit-williamson-on-eastsiders-and-revolutionary-representation/

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I also think there’s something to be said for queer stories written from and for a queer point of view. And that’s something I hope to continue doing in my career.

Another article on Nico!

In a new book, published this year by Crown, Space Between: Explorations of Love, Sex, and Fluidity, Tortorella traverses some of the same terrain as The Love Bomb in a largely memoir-ish account of their life that also reads at times like a manifesto — and one that understands their generation, millennials, at the heart of the new gender fluidity. Read more at LARB: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-millennial-fluidity-or-a-second-open-love-letter-to-nico-tortorella/

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On Millenniall

Fluidity

or, a Second Open Love Letter to Nico Tortorella

STONEWALL @ 50

THIS PAST JUNE we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, those moments in a queer bar in New York on June 28–29, 1969, when a group of faggots, trannies, and drag queens decided that they had had enough, that they didn’t want to be harassed anymore by police making periodic raids on queer establishments.  Read more at LARB: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/problem-reparative-shadow-stonewall/

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The Problem of the Reparative

in the Shadow of Stonewall

BURNING TIME -- Two videos and some news coverage!

So please that UCI made a great video explaining the BURNIGN TIME exhibit, and that local news covered the opening of the exhibit at UCI.

The UCI-produced video offers some additional background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=FCEL8CQYlRI 

And this news report, which aired Friday, May 10, provides some lovely commentary about BURNING TIME: https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/orange-county/news/2019/05/10/art-exhibit-commemorates-50th-anniversary-of-stonewall-riots 

BURNING TIME -- May 7-23 @ UCI

Burning Time is a graphic book collaboration between Professors Jonathan Alexander (English Department)) and Antoinette LaFarge (Art Department) that explores the intimacies of imagined memory and sexuality. The book consists of a cycle of 8 poems and associated panoramic paintings to tell the story of a young gay man arriving in New Orleans in the late 1950s to start a new life. The project began with a trove of photographs that Jonathan Alexander was unexpectedly given at a family retreat, forgotten images that gave him a poignant glimpse into the life of a long-dead gay uncle. He began to imagine what his uncle's life must have been like, arriving in New Orleans from rural Louisiana as a very young man in the middle of the 20th century. In conjuring his imagined version of this man's life, Jonathan soon realized that his words needed equally evocative images to create an emotional correlative of the uncle's experiences, and he invited Antoinette LaFarge into the project. Text and image interweave to evoke a particular time and place while also summoning the timelessness of self-exploration and desire— experience reimagined as mythic adventure. 

Image: Burning Time: Letters (detail), 2018

Friday, May 10, 4 p.m. - Opening Reception

Viewpoint Gallery, UCI Student Center

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BURNING TIME

Reading + Exhibition: Burning Time
with Jonathan Alexander & Antoinette LaFarge

Come to a special reading, exhibition, and reception on Burning Time, a graphic book collaboration between writer Jonathan Alexander and artist Antoinette LaFarge that explores the intimacies of imagined memory and sexuality. 

AN OFFICIAL EVENT of the 2019 LA LAMBDA LITERARY FESTIVAL

October 2, 6:30 Pm - 8:30 pm, FREE

1888 Center
115 North Orange Street, right off Plaza Square Park in Old Town Orange
Orange, CA  92866

Burning Time consists of cycle of 8 poems and 8 associated panoramic paintings to tell the story of a young gay man arriving in New Orleans in the late 1950s to start a new life. Text and image interweave to evoke a particular time and place while also summoning the timelessness of self-exploration and desire— experience reimagined as mythic adventure. In this presentation, Alexander and LaFarge read poems and present art from the book, discuss their collaboration, and consider the possibilities of multimedia for queer storytelling.

Sponsored by the 1888 Center and the 2018 Lambda Literary Festival

Jonathan Alexander is a writer, critic, and digital artist. Previous graphic collaborations include the digital book Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self and the graphic book Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing. The author, co-author, or editor of fifteen books, he is Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine.

Antoinette LaFarge is an artist and writer whose beat is virtuality and its discontents. She is especially interested in exploring text-image dynamics through artists’ books, interactive narrative, and experimental performance. She is Professor of Art at the University of California, Irvine.