Del LaGrace Volcano
A Mid-Career Retrospective
September 19–November 11, 2012
Opening: Wednesday, September 19, 6–8pm
Artist talk: Saturday, September 22, 2–4pm
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art
26 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10013
Hours: Tue–Sun, 12–6pm
Curated by Jonathan David Katz and Julia Haas
Del LaGrace Volcano: A Mid-Career Retrospective is the first U.S. museum exhibition of the gender variant artist’s 30-year career. A pioneer of LGBT photography, Volcano’s 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—and therefore little known—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.
The chief strength of Volcano’s work is his/her playfulness with categories and structures of sexuality, gender and identity—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. 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 same time 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.
“My intention is to explode the notion of the truthful body,” says Volcano. “My 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.”
Volcano’s particular kind of gender subversion is a lie that generates another lie: there is no moment of “reveal” 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 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, The Drag King Book with Judith Halberstam, Sublime Mutations, Sex Works, and Femmes of Power: Exploding Queer Femininities with Ulrika Dahl.
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.
About the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art
The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art is the first and only dedicated LGBT art museum in the world with a mission to exhibit and preserve LGBT art, and foster the artists who create it. The museum has a permanent collection of over 6,000 objects, 6–8 major exhibitions annually, artist talks, film screenings, readings, THE ARCHIVE – a quarterly art newsletter, a membership program, and a research library. The Leslie-Lohman Museum began as the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation, a non-profit founded in 1990 by Charles W. Leslie and Fritz Lohman who have supported LGBT artists for over 30 years. The Leslie-Lohman Museum embraces the rich creative history of the LGBT art community by informing, inspiring, entertaining and challenging all who enter its doors.
