Join exhibiting artists Craig Calderwood, Nicki Green, and Jordan Reznick to learn more about their work on display at the Handwerker Gallery.Join exhibiting artists Craig Calderwood, Nicki Green, and Jordan Reznick to learn more about their work on display at the Handwerker Gallery.
Artist Panel: Friday, March 23, 4 pm
Exhibition Synopsis:
MOTHA presents THE VEIL OF VERONICA
work by Craig Calderwood, Nicki Green, & Jordan Reznick
March 21-April 20, 2018
The most prized article of an archive is the “truth image,” a document created by means of physical contact with a transcendent body. The fleshy imprint confirms the existence of a being whose reality may be doubted. For the dubious transgender subject the truth image is further complicated by the fact that the trans body is an object of fascination, scrutiny and fetishization. The trans body exceeds and spoils the tidy organization of archival categories. Meanwhile, the twists of trans biographies defy the narratives of archival chronologies. Centuries of repressions and concealments have rendered most trans histories irreparably lost. These issues make the transgender archive a complexly impossible idea.
Craig Calderwood, Nicki Green, and Jordan Reznick take this inviability as an impetus to create an original repository that transcends the prosaic and deficient mainstream archive. Their work follows the mission of MOTHA (Museum of Trans Hirstory and Art) to conceptualize the trans archive as a sacred site to quench the thirst of trans souls, cure the archive of its trans blindness, and resurrect hushed trancestors from the dirty basements that civilization tried to seal shut. Green defies normative generational progression with infectious mushrooms that illustrate new understandings of time, growth, reproduction, and inheritance. Calderwood endlessly revisits her own biography, saturating and surfacing her work with an echoing iconography of characters, color, and pattern. Reznick celebrates the contemporary queer refusal to assimilate with tender portraits.
Working in ceramics, low-craft, and photography, their archival objects do not simply narrate histories. Instead they impart the presence of trans people through surfaces directly imprinted with trans bodies, lives, and legends.
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All exhibitions and events at the Handwerker Gallery are free and open to the public. The Handwerker Gallery is open Monday, Wednesday, & Friday from 10am-6pm; Thursdays from 10am-9pm; and Saturday & Sunday from 12pm-5pm. Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Mara Baldwin at mbaldwin@ithaca.edu or (607) 274-3548. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.
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https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20180319011512684