NYAB Event - Del LaGrace Volcano "A Mid-Career Retrospective"

Del LaGrace Volcano "A Mid-Career Retrospective"

Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art

This event has ended.

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.

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.

[Image: Del LaGrace Volcano "Lazlo & Shanti, London" (2004) 40 x 27.2 in., digital c-print]