“Shameless Weekend” Exhibition

Field Projects

This event has ended.

Each figure in Shameless Weekend turns the body into an instrument of liberation–– sexual or political. Bodies are sites of action and resistance. The body is also a site for vibrant celebration. The artists of Shameless Weekend revel in sexual and bodily freedom through relationships forged in the kink and queer community whilst turning a critical eye toward dominant cultural perceptions of sexual expression. These artists are sincere. Their work might flirt with comedy and cynicism but ultimately they probe social mechanisms of shame and power openly and vulnerably.

Audrey Ryan’s work is informed by the punk, hardcore and BDSM communities, years of classical ballet training and a personal history of disorder and recovery. Deja Patterson reclaims the Black female nude from their historical position as symbols of service and objectification and rejects the standards of thin White beauty with her paintings of powerful, thick bodies. Genevieve Goffman considers the way Greek bodies have endured projected ideals, sexualization, and efforts to locate Greek lives in an imagined past. Sal Salandra explores fantastical sexual subcultures in his erotic thread paintings, explicitly denying the fear, stigma, and shame around sexuality that so populates dominant cultures in the United States. Like Ryan and Patterson, Tisch Mikhail Lewis turns to self representation in order to explore the politicized and stigmatized body. Tisch’s work is self reflexive, a perpetual exploration seeking out deeper interior and exterior relationships.

With their work, the artists of Shameless Weekend make alternative ways of being shamelessly visible. There are loving, playful, awkward and sexy works, all unabashedly claiming space and breaking the narrative of homogeneous ideal bodies and sexualities.