Inside the Art, Outside Ourselves is a series of workshops that each invite you to spend time reflecting on a specific artwork from our main exhibition, Paradise, curated by Graham Feyl & J. Sova. Through guiding prompts and conversation, we encourage you to dig deeper into the work, think meaningfully about the ideas presented, and to respond with drawing or writing exercises. Artists to be featured include Aaron McIntosh, Angie Jennings, & Yu Yan.
This month, we’ll be looking at Aaron McIntosh’s work “Invasive Queer Kudzu” and talking about “visibility, strength and tenacity in the face of presumed ‘unwantedness’”.
About the Project:
Engulfing hills, trees and old buildings in a dense stranglehold, the kudzu vine colonizes and alien landscapes emerge. An “invasive” species, kudzu taps into our fears of otherness, connecting it in many ways to perceptions of queerness. Such interspecies anxiety is not wholly unlike the persistent fear that a “homosexual agenda” could sweep across the nation if left unchecked. Today, polls show us that many parts of the U.S. are “naturally” moving towards gay marriage equality and expanded rights for LGBTQ people. Yet, the land of kudzu is often portrayed as a place of entrenched homophobia. Lost in this politicized fray are the lives, memories, stories and histories of Southern queers and their ingenuity contending with the status quo.
Invasive, a project for Southern queers and their allies, subverts the negative characterization of invasive species and uses queer kudzu as a symbol of visibility, strength and tenacity in the face of presumed “unwantedness”. Traveling across the Southern states, the project will facilitate the collection of stories of LGBTQ people through workshops at community centers and historical documents from archives. Drawing on the preeminence of quilting in Southern folkways and the work of creator Aaron McIntosh, the artist will embed these stories, photographs, and archive documents into quilted leaves and vines. Eventually forming an overwhelming and undeniable mass of Southern queerness, the kudzu will be exhibited at art centers and public events across the Southeast.
About the Artist
Aaron McIntosh (b. 1984) grew up in Kingsport, TN, a factory town in the Appalachian foothills of East Tennessee. A fourth-generation quilter, his family’s working class environment and domestic material culture figure large in his art practice. McIntosh’s education includes a BFA from the Appalachian Center for Craft and a MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. His exhibition record includes numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Queer Threads: Crafting Identity & Community at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art in New York, and most recently Man-Made: Contemporary Male Quilters at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles. His work has been published in the LA Weekly, ArtNews, the Houston Chronicle, American Craft magazine, FiberArts, and the Surface Design Journal. His essay, “Parallel Closets”, was published in the April 2014 edition of the Brooklyn Rail. McIntosh currently lives in Baltimore, MD, and teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art as a Professor in the Fiber Department.
www.aaronmcintosh.com