Arpedia

Like many of Opie’s works, Mike and Sky presents female masculinity to defy a binary understanding of gender. The very practice of being photographed raises many complex issues around gender performance and the relationships between an inner self and an outer public persona. Even though Mike and Sky are cropped and obscure one another, many of their choices for self-presentation—as emphasized by their tattoos—remain visible.

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SHE MAD: Laughing Gas

Martine Syms

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Her 2016 video installation quotes the sitcom-as-form and also draws from a 1907 comedic short, Laughing Gas. Syms’s 4-channel installation follows the central character (an aspiring artist also named Martine Syms) on a journey home from the dentist after receiving “laughing gas.” Mixing multiple points of view, clips borrowed from TV, as well as layers of comedy, fiction, reality, and critique, Syms’ work also delves into issues of race, culture, and representation. For Los Angeles-based Martine Syms, popular culture, television, and the cultural histories woven through both are starting points for her interdisciplinary art practice.

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Abece “K”

Johanna Calle

Johanna Calle’s Abece “K” (2011) is part of a series of drawings (compiled into an artist book called Abece ) based on the alphabet. There is a drawing for each letter, in which the letter is repeated over and again in various directions and scales, thereby demonstrating how a symbol can be reoriented without changing its linguistic meaning. Here, the letter K is outlined and surrounded by a dense and varied field of other K s.

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Suburbia 1, Espinca bifida #3, Laconista7

Johanna Calle

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Calle’s drawings all inhabit received forms but alter them to call attention to specific qualities. A newspaper is both reproduced and modified to call attention to the newspaper as a means of information transmission. This also emphasizes the effect of various seemingly unimportant support mechanisms: the role of visual layout and images.

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Angela (crotch grab)

Catherine Opie

Angela (crotch grab)

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Cathy (bed self-portrait)

Catherine Opie

Catherine Opie’s candid photograph Cathy (bed Self-portrait) (1987) shows the artist atop a bed wearing a negligee and a dildo; the latter is attached to a whip that she holds in her teeth. Opie is known for her honest portraits of diverse individuals, from LGBT people to football players, and the self-portrait has also been a long-standing and important part of her practice. Instead of hiding her sexuality and interest in sadomasochism, Opie wears it proudly.

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Freeway Series

Catherine Opie

Although best known as a provocateur and portraitist, Opie also photographs landscapes, cityscapes, and architecture. The Freeway Series was developed in 1995, right after the artist’s inclusion in that year’s Whitney Biennial. As if suggesting that her work should not be restricted to being seen through overtly political or activist lenses, this series lends insight into the city of Los Angeles via its most characteristic urban feature: its highways.

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Raven (gun)

Catherine Opie

In this work, a woman sits on a couch with her shirt pulled up to expose her pierced nipples, which are connected by a chain. She wears an expression of both pleasure and intensity as she points a gun at someone or something outside of the frame. Raven (gun) (1994) is not so much threatening as full of sexuality and potential energy.

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Alistair Fate

Catherine Opie

Alistair Fate (1994) depicts, presumably, a member of the LGBT community. Catherine Opie is known for her portraits of LGBT, queer, and outsider people; she intends them to come off not as shocking or different, but as human despite their deviance from societal norms. This image is one of several works by Opie in the Kadist Collection that show marginalized people, filtered through the artist’s signature appropriation of formal and classical portraiture in the interest of both documentation and reframing.

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Linda, Lee & Dorsey, Louis (1988~, 2018)

Marcel Pardo Ariza

In Linda, Lee & Dorsey, Louis (1988~, 2018) Marcel Pardo Ariza draws on Bay Area queer histories that have been uncovered from local archives and queer organizations, and connects them to people currently living in the Bay, where Ariza is also based. This particular portrait features a skein of arms and legs, in both color and black and white print, intimately woven together. Tender and sensual, the tangle of limbs incorporates both stereotypically feminine and masculine traits in various skin tones.

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Choke

Jennifer Locke

Choke documents the artist filming a wrestler “choking out” his teammate until he is unconscious. This closed circuit of dominance and submission between two powerful men, is echoed by the closed circuit of the video through which the viewer takes on the role of voyeur. The artist’s presence in the piece not only calls attention to its staging, but inverts the traditional power dynamic of the “male gaze” and gender roles.

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Mom

Sadie Benning

In borrowing and subverting images from popular culture, Sadie Benning exposes the media’s role in constructing false and oppressive stereotypes of women, with regard to gender and sexual identity. This small painting, titled Mom , is a concise, eloquent visual statement. Many of her paintings incorporate found imagery, family photos, and everyday objects.

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Resurgimiento [Resurgence]

Wynnie Mynerva Mendoza Ortiz

Wynnie Mynerva places their body at the center of their practice from an intimate perspective and healing dimension. Their paintings are thresholds where body parts proliferate beyond names and labels, dissolving and intermingling gender marks, organs, and prostheses. Resurgimiento [Resurgence] was produced in the aftermath of their fifth solo show Closing to Open (Galería Ginsberg, Lima, 2021), in which Mynerva addressed their experience of going through a vaginal surgical procedure to help them feel more aligned with their gender identity.

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Searching for We’wha

Carlos Motta

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Searching for We’wha is composed of five photographic triptychs combining photographs from the American West (New Mexico and Arizona) with excerpts from American Indian poetry in an attempt to reconstruct imaginary aspects of the life of We’Wha, a famous member of the Zuni tribe, who was born male but who lived a feminine gender expression. With this work, Carlos Motta aims to question gender fluidity, indeterminacy, neutrality and non-conformity, using We’wha as an image of the ways in which Two-Spirit American Indians express gender in non-Western non-traditional ways. They are often accepted and revered by their tribes, and in We’wha’s case she even became an official representative of their social interests.

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Deferral Archive #1

siren eun young jung

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Historical representations of the female form and the clichés and misunderstandings that surround them have been the subject of recent research and historical revision. Marry, Fuck, Kill by Ruth Patir reimagines sculptures of fertility goddesses from ancient times as real-life women by animating them as a moving sculptural bodies. In a country such as Israel, where the presence of ancient ruins are common, if not everyday for some, this work speaks both to the present and the distant past, and draws continuities between.

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Funerals under Neon Lights

Tomoko Kikuchi

The series Funerals under Neon Lights by Tomoko Kikuchi focuses on how transgender people’s ritual became a vital part of funerals in rural China. Funerals in China have diversified to very unique forms, especially in rural areas. Shot in Sichuan province, Guizhou Province, and Chongqing between 2014 to 2017, the three photographs: Liangzi offering prayer, Chongqing , Liangzi at the funeral, Sichuan province , and Bereaved family at the funeral, Sichuan province feature funerals where eccentric performances by transgender performers, little people, young female performers and singers dressing bikini costume, magicians and acrobatics performers take place under gaudy neon light.

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Untitled (Four-legged figure with three arms)

Clare Rojas

Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters. While Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) does not depict any actual women, it nevertheless alludes to gender roles and the power of the female gaze. Apparently playful, this scene of two animals has an ominous quality: A bird and a hedgehog confront at each other and the bird appears to be poking, even eating the hedgehog’s eye.

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Untitled (Bird and Eyes)

Clare Rojas

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Secrets Between Her and Her Shadow 10

Maryam Hoseini

Secrets Between Her and Her Shadow 10 by Maryam Hoseini is from a series of paintings of the same title that are inspired by the story Layla and Majnun – an Arabic love story about Majnun, a 7th century Bedouin poet, and his lover, Layla. Hoseini’s compositions are visually inspired by the illustrations accompanying the Khamsa of Nizami , a manuscript of five poems, including Layla and Majnun , produced by the Persian poet Nizami in the 1590s. Unlike the original tale, Hoseini’s paintings focus entirely on Layla, any male characters are purposefully erased from this narrative.

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Horseback

Sam Contis

Sam Contis’s photographs explore the relationship of bodies to landscape, and the shifting nature of gender identity and expression. Horseback is part of a photographic series Contis made at Deep Springs College, one of the United States’s last all-male institutions of higher learning, located in a remote desert valley on the California–Nevada border. Horseback is a black and white photograph that depicts the arched shoulders of a horse, its slick mane splayed across its neck.

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Oil

Sam Contis

Sam Contis’s photographs explore the relationship of bodies to landscape, and the shifting nature of gender identity and expression. Oil is part of a photographic series Contis made at Deep Springs College, one of the United States’s last all-male institutions of higher learning, located in a remote desert valley on the California–Nevada border. Oil features a hand in front of an open hood of a car, checking the oil.

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Deferral Theatre

siren eun young jung

Taking the same name as their most recent solo show at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, siren eun young jung’s video work Deferral Theatre intertwines various threads from the last decade of the artist’s research into the Yeoseong Gukgeuk theatrical form, in which all of the roles are played by women, as well as performance-based modes of queer resistance in South Korea. The radical and temporally border-crossing qualities of gender fluidity, and lineages of queer subversion within performative spaces, animate Deferral Theatre through a critical deconstruction of Korean history, tradition and gender norms. One particularly powerful scene depicts a young drag king performer tearing at their suit and tie as they lip-sync passionately to a song in English, while the frame lilts with an ecstatic languor, as if the operator of the camera were staggering feverishly.

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Untitled

Frida Orupabo

The archival images used by Frida Orupabo in her collages trace stereotyped representations of race, gender, sexuality and violence. Her works are developed through a process of decontextualization of such imagery, layering and recomposing, playing with new narratives. In this work she focuses on memory and what might be triggered in the viewer.

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Dorian, a cinematic perfume

Michelle Handelman

In Dorian, a cinematic perfume, video is used as a community gatherer, a tool to speak about particular subcultures, in this case the trans-gender drag queen New York community, past and present. Developed from a literary work, it deconstructs notions of narrative forms, styles and conventions. It is a hybrid piece, an example of the elasticity of the medium.

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KEBRANTO

Jonas Van and Juno B