Blue Like Fortune by Jenna Houston, Kasem Kydd, and Gray Swartzel

Blue Like Fortune, 5/4/18 - 5/24/18

Blue Like Fortune was an exhibition of works by Jenna Kay Houston, Kasem Kydd, and Gray Swartzel curated by Reese McArdle. Through a mix of contemporary mediums including video, sculpture, photography, and installation the artists transformed the Bunker Projects gallery - already once transformed from domestic space to art space - into a space for imaging possible futures. The artists set out, queering past and present, on an investigation of our collective preoccupation with binary structures and symbolic roles. Among other, often intertwined, areas of investigation:

Houston created work that queers domestic space and investigated narratives between chronic illness and gender

Kydd explored the tangible and metaphoric role of the ocean as an instrument in the slave trade as well as water’s capacity for cleansing and transformation

Swartzel considers symbolic roles like that of mother/son or masculine/feminine through the lens of Lacan, positing a preoccupation with theses symbolic roles as an obscuring of Lacan’s object petit a, or the object cause of desire

In these combined works we are left to ask: Is it our roles, our position in systems and histories, that give us meaning? And if so, can new meaning be discovered in a project of challenging this particular symbolic order?

jennahouston.com

kasemkydd.com

grayswartzel.com