FAGGOTS AND THEIR FRIENDS BETWEEN REVOLUTIONS
The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions is a bold and evocative exhibition that highlights the transformative power of LGBTQIA+ creativity and its significant contribution to the growing body of queer archives. On view at Gallery 157 from December 3–12, 2024, this solo exhibition by Steele Alden explores the rich history and contemporary vitality of queer art as a dynamic force that reflects the diverse, ever-evolving experiences of queer life. It honors the resilience, joy, and resistance embedded in queer cultural production, underscoring the ways in which art serves as a tool for self-affirmation, collective celebration, and the ongoing fight for liberation.
Ecstatic Utterances
Ecstatic Utterances is a series of paintings exploring altered states of being through depictions of queer intimacy, religious folklore, and dreams. Vivid, large-scale paintings act as portals transporting the viewer to transcendent worlds where anything is possible and everything is beautiful. Populated with birds, horses, queer bodies, and saintly impressions— these works begin to create their own theology. This series of paintings includes four, large-scale pieces depicting intimate, queer happenings and dreamy landscapes through a mix of graphic shapes and loose, gestural mark-making. The work utilizes complex color pallets, figure interaction, and thoughtfully activated compositions to create an engaging and dynamic body of work.
SECOND SKIN
“Second Skin” plays with the ideas of reparative objectification and material kinship, pulling art objects and performance together in an effort to humanize the object and objectify the human. This exhibition aims to open up explorative play grounded in transsexual/object relationships, from finding personhood in leather, lace, and latex to the euphoria of becoming an object at the hands of another. Beyond kinship, this objectification also holds another use, twisting the indignities of survival in a commodified world into a type of subversive personal agency. Using a blend of sculpture, photography, painting, printmaking, and performance, Steele, Eden, aHawk open space for viewers and friends to delight in experiences of euphoric community–both human and non-human– and draw heavily from their lived experience with kink, T4T relationships, and sex work to explore the power and pleasure of the body-as-object.