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ReMix: ReFraming Appropriation

SOMArts Main Gallery, 934 Brannan Street
Opening Reception June 1, 6pm
Exhibit continues thru June 26

Join the Queer Cultural Center(QCC) in a reunion of visual arts programs housed at SOMArts! ReMix: ReFraming Appropriation mines fifteen years of National Queer Arts Festival exhibitions towards understanding the centrality of the act of appropriation for queer art of the recent past. Using appropriation as its lens, curator Jonathan D. Katz includes those works for redisplay that map the parameters of queer appropriation as it has evolved through to today.

Included in the exhibition is Frank Pietronigro's installation 'Documents' an ephemeral installation of homophobic words stenciled by the artist, using salt, into the gallery floor. 'Documents' at first invites the audience to absorb the magnitude of the verbal homophobia, presented in the work and then Pietronigro invites the audience with assisting in deconstructing that work. What remains is a painting created by the footprints left by everyone who walks within the gallery space.

'Documents' was first presented with an audience as a time based art installation in the Diego Rivera Gallery at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996. To date, Frank Pietronigro has based this work upon negative signifiers, used in the English language, that have been applied to gay men throughout the ages. These 'Documents' are structured into our language that demonstrates our bigotry and reinforces our homophobia that causes harm, death and wounding. Language is the most powerful tool for creating meaning; language inspires both positive and negative ideologies. Because it is causative in promoting thoughts and actions, language matters. The pejorative words applied to the LGBTQ communities have caused and continue to cause great suffering, alienation, suicide and even death. To see these words manifest in one location is to grasp the power of the verbal and ideopgraphic fuel that can lead to something as horrific as the 1999 murder of Matthew Shepard in addition to countless others. Each footstep will counteract the imprint that negative language has had in creating the disenfranchisement of the LGBTQ communities. By so doing, their footprints of recuperation support the deconstruction of these negative signifiers.