BLAA: TBD

TBD by Boston LGBTQIA+ Artist Alliance
Exhibition Dates: Friday, September 10, 2021 - Sunday, October 17, 2021
Gallery Hours: Fridays - Sundays, 12pm-6pm (masks are required and available if needed)

Boston Cyberarts is proud to present our first interior gallery exhibition in over a year - TBD by The Boston LGBTQIA+ Artist Alliance (BLAA). Queerness refuses absolutes. TBD is an exploration of the versatility of queer new media and the tenderness of technology. The works are in their own respects transitory, breaking binary through new formats and within new code. In an age of surging updates and information, these works become fluid in their indeterminate process.⁣

CURATED BY

Ena Kantardžić
Juan Omar Rodriguez
Jasper A. Sanchez

CURATorial statement

TBD debuts newly created and iterated works by nine queer artists from Greater Boston who explore the ways digital technologies help us traverse new worlds. As an acronym for things that are expected to happen, but with aspects that are not yet set, TBD runs parallel to José Esteban Muñoz’s theorizations of queerness as a horizon—a destination “not yet here.” Legacy Russell’s theorizations of digital space as continuous with “real life” are also instructive in the works of these artists: rather than assuming rigid distinctions between online and offline existence, the artists in this exhibition embrace the potential of new media to critique the material present and imagine other possibilities for performance, memory, intimacy, community, and futurity. Like Russell’s engagement with ideas of the glitch, these artists lean into failure and deviance to create works that embrace possibility and refuse hegemonic absolutes. Continuing the Boston LGBTQIA+ Artist Alliance’s commitment to cultivate an intergenerational community of creatives, this exhibition brings together a mix of emerging and mid-career artists who together offer a rich spectrum of new media work. Organized in collaboration with Cyberarts, the only independent exhibiting space in Massachusetts exclusively dedicated to showing new and experimental media, TBD offers a platform to appreciate the incredible work of queer artists in Greater Boston and highlights the roles queer artists play at the intersections of digital technology and artistic innovation

featured artists

Keith Becker-Lazore, Ryan Gurry, Ena Kantardžić, Matthew LaPaglia, Nori Needle, Jennifer Pipp, Allison Maria Rodriguez, Hogan Seidel and Frankie Symonds

about the artists

Keith Becker-Lazore (he/him) is a Boston-based studio educator and 3D artist who works primarily with ceramics to explore the ‘squishiness’ of emotional states of being and our understanding of empathy. Since the pandemic, he has expanded into other mediums in his ongoing intrigue of both the tangibility and ephemerality of emotions. Keith Becker-Lazore presents Save Space (2021). The work is created from the combined usage of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super Gameboy cartridge. Once used as toys for entertainment, years later they become a new digital medium and a gateway for nostalgia; using nostalgic qualities to engage viewers with new, or alien, imagery through a familiar mechanism in an emotionally vulnerable state

Ryan Gurry (he/they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist living in Boston MA. Through a multitude of different mediums, they explore how we consume the world around us and in turn how the world consumes us. Working as a painter, 3d illustrator/animator, musician and filmmaker, they still feel art is fun :-) This series of self portraits, takes a literal approach to how we decode gender identity through a shared visual language, and investigates how the performative nature of the internet impacts our understanding of the self. The first two portraits, made in reference to the perceived gender binary, are converted from png images and translated to ASCII characters. These two text documents are then copied and pasted into a new document where characters are continuously transferred randomly from the source portraits. Overtime they become intertwined and merged, creating a new image that is in constant transition between the two. This pieces asks how technology warps the lens we see ourselves through, and who is at the wheel? As algorithmic trends and filters continue to change the way we see and share ourselves, how will the complexity of self identity evolve with ourselves and one another.

Ena Kantardžić (they/them) is a Bosnian-American interdisciplinary artist working in Boston’s gay nightlife. Their work ranges from club lighting to prose poetry, and focuses on immediacy, language, and semiotics. They are a recent graduate of Massachusetts College of Art and Design’s Studio for Interrelated Media and a board member of the Boston LGBTQIA+ Artist Alliance. The Kiss (eclipse) (2021) is a sculpture and performance coded and implemnented via micro-controller. Unsteady, love’s precarity holds fast almost timelessly. What happens when the tilting of two intelligent moving heads ensues, synchronized then colliding? An eclipse, the darkness–eyes closed. A kiss. Pulled from the ceiling of one of the last gay bars in Boston, the lights signify the meeting of two abstract forms–two queer entities melding.

Matthew LaPaglia (he/him) is a writer, filmmaker, and transdisciplinary artist working in video, installation, and performance art. His work explores art practice as a historiographical tool, interrogating where memory and identity coalesce with collective narrative. His work has been shown in New York, Massachusetts, and Tennessee. LaPaglia received a Bachelor of Arts from Colgate University, where he studied history, and an MFA from Emerson College, in Boston, where he currently lives and works. Telephlâneur (2019) blends video and performance to capture the psyche of a walker through in-phone activity that filters both the external world and the internal world into a digital symptom of the two, combined.

Nori Needle (they/them)is an multi-diciplinary artist, primarily working within the intersections of 3D modeling, animation, illustration, graphic design, video games, film, sculpture, social practice, and performance. Their work navigates the intricacies of play and its connection to labor, imagination, consumerism, mass-media, education, and bodily autonomy. They recently received their BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design’s Studio for Interrelated Media program and completed the Convering Liberations Residency at Mass MoCA. For Needle, [Minecrate (2020)] contains a duality between possibility and necessity. By coupling video game modding with the personification of the milk crate, Needle seeks to navigate the tension between our capacity for imagining alterations to the AFK world around us and the seduction of virtual world building. The virtual world provides a playground for ideas as well as a distraction from, or simply an alternative to, the understanding of our own materiality. As we pass back and forth between digital and non-digital spaces, who/what is the modular object? Nori Needle will also be presenting new work made during their residency.

Jenn Pipp (they/them) followed their gut to art school and received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in 2001. Through rigorous study and application Jenn earned the Four Winds Luminous Healing and Energy Medicine certificate in 2011. They integrated fine arts and ceremonial practices and started performing ceremonies. They were refined while completing a MFA from Emerson College in MFA in Film and Media Art in 2020. The process is called digital fire or Path of Data and uses live streamed information as an analogue to the transformational process of fire. You can experience it on their YouTube channel, Jenn Pipp and learn more at www. jennpipp.com. Their work WILD TIME (2021) is inspired by the crisp clear energy of a full moon. It is intentionally focused and succinct in nature. The words of the invocation that starts the ceremony: The earth remembers everything. The earth is everything here. The earth welcomes us to unburden our fear and shame so we can see clearly and find our alignment. The Earth is big time; wild time. It is not shaped by our small time; control time. The human collective is addicted to control and force. Presence allows us to focus and create. Force pushes our will onto others. There is no longevity in unnatural force; it dissipates and needs constant reapplication. Natural forces that inform the cycles are eternal and need no maintenance. Discovering the natural flow running under the control time offers unlimited creative potential. Creating inspires others to join in. In wild time your visions will blossom like a flower. Forcing it open will dismember it. But the cycle can begin again because blossoming is part of the eternal cycle. Blossom and others will want to blossom with you. This ceremony shifts from hyper to heartbeat. It is dedicated to the ever present wild time. What is ready to blossom within you?

Allison Maria Rodriguez (she/her) is a first-generation Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist working predominately in video installation and new media. She creates immersive experiential spaces that challenge conventional ways of knowing and understanding the world. Her work focuses extensively on climate change, species extinction and the interconnectivity of existence. Through video, performance, digital animation, photography, drawing, collage and installation, Rodriguez merges and blends mediums to create new pictorial spaces for aesthetic, emotional and conceptual exploration. She uses art to communicate beyond language – to open up a space of possibility for the viewer to encounter alternative ways of connecting to the emotional realities of others. Funded in part by a grant from The CreateWell Fund, Legends Breathe (an ongoing project) explores the power of creativity and the imagination in overcoming traumatic experiences. Based on interviews with different female-identified and non-binary artists about childhood fantasies that assisted them in overcoming trauma or extreme circumstances, this project speaks to a strategy and methodology of survival activated through the power of creativity. Each video, which are often installed together as an interactive installation, explores these individual fantasies, highlighting their uniqueness, their commonalities, and their inherent power. One primary element evident in all the fantasies is a harvesting of strength and transcendence through a deep connection to the natural world. The work is populated by endangered species and threatened habitats, conveying a link between the trauma and healing of our planet to that of the individual.

Hogan Seidel (they/them) is an interdisciplinary media artist working in the traditions of experimental film, photochemical abstraction, and collage. They examine queer, southern, religious identity through the plastic medium of celluloid. Torn from the swamps of Florida, Hogan now resides in Boston, where they live with their husband and dog, Meatloaf. Blumen von Familie (2021) is for the family (chosen and not) who gifted Seidel with queerness, with flowers, with gentleness. The first gift is from their uncle, for the knowledge of flower care and gardening, for the queer blood that runs through us both. These are 35mm slides, cut together with scissors and tape. The second gift is from their husband and mother-in-law. Gifting Seidel table flowers that bring them joy. They pressed these flowers onto film using ink. The third gift is from my students. They picked flowers together and pressed them to film– allowing the plants’ chemistry to create odd shapes and figures that dance.

Frankie Symonds (they/them) is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, and curator from and based in the Boston area. Their work seeks to deconstruct and and scrutinize the traditional tools of time-based media: fiction, nonfiction, narrative, montage, suspension of disbelief; all in the context of a digital “post-truth, fake news” society and living as a queer person in it. In 2018, Frankie’s film THE GREEN WARDROBE won best experimental film at the Wicked Queer Film Festival in Boston, and went on to be featured at Cinema Of Gender Transgression at Anthology Film Archives later that year. Their work has been exhibited in the United States and Europe at venues and festivals including MFA Boston, ICA Boston, Anthology Film Archives, MassArt Film Society, Dikeou Collection Denver, Outsider Fest Texas and Pantalla Fantasma in Spain. They recently finished producing a 20-episode season of their first cable access series, Queer Cats, which was highlighted at their first solo screening at Cinema of Gender Transgression in New York Winter of 2019. In He Wanted To Design Cars (2020) the life and death of a closeted queer person is told through a true crime documentary in which his father tries to explain that all he ever wanted was to design cars. It was originally to be performed live, but with Covid, I decided to broadcast it on IG, which was obviously much different than doing it live, but gave it certain confines and restrictions as a piece of new media art that I thought were especially interesting. I combined music, theatrical performance, and costumes and masks I made to try to tell a disjointed story that is often told in an established media language using new and unexpected media languages. Frankie Symonds will also be sharing GIFs after recently relocated to Salem after divorcing the person they spent the last 10 years with and it has become the place where they are taking their transition to new levels.

about the curators

Ena Kantardžić (they/them) is a Bosnian-American interdisciplinary artist working in Boston’s gay nightlife. Their work ranges from club lighting to prose poetry, and focuses on immediacy, language, and semiotics. They are a recent graduate of Massachusetts College of Art and Design’s Studio for Interrelated Media and a board member of the Boston LGBTQIA+ Artist Alliance. As a curator, they are interested in the accessibility of art within life, which is heavily implicated by a diasporic upbringing in the Boston-area.

Juan Omar Rodriguez (he/him) is a contemporary art curator and art historian. He is currently a Curatorial Fellow at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and has also worked at the Boston Arts Academy; the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and at the Tufts University Art Galleries. Juan Omar earned an M.A. in Art History and Museum Studies from Tufts University in 2019 and a B.A. in Neuroscience from Oberlin College in 2017.

Jasper A. Sanchez (he/they) is a Colombian-American graduate from the Art History & Critical Theory program at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, immersion in public and contemporary art since his youth has inspired him to focus his studies on contemporary curatorial practice, with an interest in queer Latinx scholarship driving his thesis research. Overall, his interest as a curator lies in intersecting contemporary curatorial practice with decolonial action and socially engaged practice- striving to use his skills to provide a platform to artists from marginalized backgrounds and help make their art accessible and impactful for communities both local and global.