ERICKA JONES-CRAVEN

September 27, 2017 - January 21, 2018 New Museum

Curatorial Decision

Specification: Curatorial Activism

The title of this exhibition implies multiple meanings and associations, from the firing of a gun to the suggestion of an inextricable warning, 42 artists share works budding themes of explicit pleasure and stir up possibilities to answer the question of how does one exist within a system that is essentially a series of signifiers. Johanna Burton, head curator of the exhibition, joins forces with assistant curator’s Sara O’Keeffe and Natalie Bell to campaign artists whose personal experiences are rooted in courses of the insensible in psychoanalysis. Burton was co-currently editing Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility during the development of the exhibition alongside artist-activists Eric Stanley and Reina Gossett. The anthology structures representations of trans identity throughout art and popular culture. Shuffled with essays, conversations and archival theories, this exhibition has a solid foundation in investigations involving members of the LGBTQ+ community who actively and passively battle with the stigmas of gender in a non-conforming society. 

Trigger: Gender As A Tool and a Weapon is being categorized as an exhibition based in curatorial activism for a variety of reasons. The curators are engaging in literary activism that expands on the politics of visibility within the trans community which is overselling to the basis of the collection of works.

The artists in Trigger: Gender As A Tool and a Weapon share a desire to contest repressive orders and to speculate on new forms and aesthetics—a desire to picture other futures. For many, developing new vocabularies necessarily entails a productive reworking of historical configurations. A number of artists in the exhibition—including Josh Faught, Reina Gossett and Sasha Wortzel, Ellen Lesperance, Mickalene Thomas, and Candice Lin—return to archival materials in order to critique, build upon, and explore longstanding debates around intersectionality, alliance, and the project of world-building. Beauty is not supplemental to politics here, but central to the process of positing and building new social structures. The exhibition brings together a range of practitioners, some with a longstanding commitment to activism—such as Nancy Brooks Brody, an original member of the collective fierce pussy, and Vaginal Davis, who has long critiqued systematic oppression tied to gender, race, class, and sexuality—alongside emerging artists such as Sable Elyse Smith, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Chris E. Vargas, whose works variously plumb mechanisms of regulation.