{"id":7778,"date":"2012-08-25T10:28:31","date_gmt":"2012-08-25T08:28:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.femininemoments.dk\/blog\/?p=7778"},"modified":"2012-08-25T10:30:08","modified_gmt":"2012-08-25T08:30:08","slug":"new-york-del-lagrace-volcano-a-mid-career-retrospective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.femininemoments.dk\/blog\/new-york-del-lagrace-volcano-a-mid-career-retrospective\/","title":{"rendered":"New York: Del LaGrace Volcano – A Mid-Career Retrospective"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lazlo<\/p>\n

Lazlo & Shanti, 2004, 40 x 27.2 in., digital c-print by Del Lagrace Volcano<\/em> <\/p>\n

Del LaGrace Volcano: A Mid-Career Retrospective<\/code>
\nCurated by Jonathan David Katz and Julia Haas
\nSeptember 19-November 11, 2012
\nOpening Reception: Wednesday, September 19, 6-8pm
\nThe Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art
\n26 Wooster Street, New York City, USA<\/p>\n

\"Del<\/p>\n

Del LaGrace Volcano, Self Portrait Collaboration with Gerard Rancinan, Paris, 2004, 24 x 24 in., digital c-print<\/em><\/p>\n

[August 1, 2012\u2013 New York, NY] The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art is proud to present Del LaGrace Volcano: A Mid-Career Retrospective, the first U.S. museum exhibition of the gender variant artist\u2019s 30-year career. A pioneer of LGBT photography, Volcano\u2019s work undercuts assumptions about the legibility of gender. Widely celebrated as a significant figure at the center of a conversation about the body, gender and sexuality in Europe, Volcano is little shown \u2014 and therefore little known \u2014 in the United States where s\/he was born. In a survey of portraits and self-portraits, Volcano, with disarming frankness, charts the often complicated relationship between physical transformation and shifting identifications. <\/p>\n

The chief strength of Volcano\u2019s work is his\/her playfulness with categories and structures of sexuality, gender and identity \u2013 a push to redefine the body as always in process, a mutable container of flesh. Volcano mobilizes his\/her intersex gender and identity as an alternative to binary gender norms, recognizing that for many gender, like sexuality, is not an either\/or equation. Above all, Volcano’s work is not transgender, at least as the term is normally deployed to suggest the legible progression from one gender to another, but rather about intersex, the interstitial space between genders, partaking at the sametime of aspects of both. As the use of alternating pronouns evidences, Volcano understands his\/her work as a continuous challenge to standards of gender legibility and knowability. When s\/he photographs a gender indeterminate black model in black face dressed in showy vaudeville garb in a desolately unpeopled all-white Antarctic landscape, all visible signifiers of identity cancel each other out. White meets black, blackface meets black, culture meets nature, male meets female. <\/p>\n

Volcano\u2019s refusal to adhere to knowable standards extends to every level of his\/her work, resulting in images that question assumptions about gender, as well as mainstream social standards including race, sexuality, and beauty.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy intention is to explode the notion of the truthful body,\u201d says Volcano. \u201cMy work demonstrates how physiological sex is every bit as much of a cultural construct as gender. Although we all know that the relationship between a photograph and the truth is unreliable at best, we still want to believe what our eyes tell us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Jax<\/p>\n

Jax Back, Jackie McConochie, London, 1992, 22 x 19 in., digital c-print by Del Lagrace Volcano<\/em><\/p>\n

Volcano\u2019s particular kind of gender subversion is a lie that generates another lie: there is no moment of \u201creveal\u201d like in the climax of the old time drag show where the queen removes her hair and gender is again re-stabilized. Instead, what is revealed from the performance in these images is more performance. Del LaGrace Volcano was born in California and currently lives in Sweden. S\/he attended the San Francisco Art Institute, and received an MA in Photographic Studies at the University of Derby in 1992. Volcano has published five books, Love Bites (Gay Men\u2019s Press, 1991), The Drag King Book with Judith Halberstam Serpent\u2019s Tail, 1999), Sublime Mutations (Konkursbuchverlag, 2000), Sex Works(Konkursbuchverlag, 2005), Femmes of Power: Exploding Queer Femininities with Ulrika Dahl (Serpent\u2019s Tail, 2009).<\/p>\n

Selected exhibitions include sh(OUT) at the Museum of Modern Art, Glasgow, Scotland; Corpus Queer: Bodies in Resistance at Le Transpalette Centre for Contemporary Art in Bourges, France; Street Style at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; Das Achte Feld: The Eighth Square, Ludwig Museum, Koln, Germany; and En Todas Partes: Politicas de la Diversidad En El Arte (Everywhere: Sexual Diversity Policies in Art), Centro Galego De Arte Contemporanea in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.<\/p>\n

Volcano\u2019s work has been cited and reproduced in numerous publications, journals and books on visual art and queer and feminist theory, including Female Masculinity by Judith Halberstam, the Guggenheim exhibition catalog Rrose Is A Rrose Is A Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography, Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs by Tessa Boffin and Jean Fraser, Intersex and After in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay studies, Art and Photography by David Campany, and The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader edited by Amelia Jones.<\/p>\n

Del LaGrace Volcano: A Mid-Career Retrospective will be on view September 19 through November 11, 2012. there will be an opening reception Wednesday, September 19 from 6 to 8 pm. Books by Volcano, Femmes of Power and Sublime Mutations, will be available for purchase.<\/p>\n

\"Rachel<\/p>\n

Rachel Maddow at Home in my Studio, London, 1998, 22 x 19 in., digital c-print by Del Lagrace Volcano<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lazlo & Shanti, 2004, 40 x 27.2 in., digital c-print by Del Lagrace Volcano Del LaGrace Volcano: A Mid-Career Retrospective Curated by Jonathan David Katz and Julia Haas September 19-November 11, 2012 Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 19, 6-8pm The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art 26 Wooster Street, New…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,23],"tags":[125],"class_list":["post-7778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography","category-queer-art","tag-del-lagrace-volcano"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.femininemoments.dk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.femininemoments.dk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.femininemoments.dk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.femininemoments.dk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.femininemoments.dk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.femininemoments.dk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.femininemoments.dk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.femininemoments.dk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.femininemoments.dk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}