The Second Shift Spring Juried Exhibition features artworks by eight queer or women-identifying artists based in Minnesota: Sophia Munic, Madeeha Lamoreaux, Kieu My Truong, Kadi Vail, Ryn Stafford, Lyn Corelle, and HML. The artworks have been selected through an open call among a pool of 65 applicants by 2022-2023 Second Shift residents Jocelyn Figueroa, Cameron Downey, and Zoe Cinel. The eight featured artworks express, through a variety of media, techniques, and aesthetics, a longing for or a celebration of intimate moments and spaces.
Sexual desire, and especially queer desire, is yet to be widely accepted and celebrated in society and mass media but there is an urgency and a demand for representation of a wider range of expressions of sexuality, embodiment of desire but also softness and trauma within female and queer bodies. This exhibition brings together some of these perspectives. In the soft sculpture Prized Possession (2022), Sophia Munic describes moments of desire within queer culture by presenting a dildo as a hunter’s conquest by using quilt piecing and patternmaking. To speak about one’s sexuality can be empowering but can also reveal personal and generational trauma within this racist and ableist society. On one hand, the poem by Ryn Stafford draws connections between abuse, colonialism, and the medical system, on the other, the soft sculpture Bohemian Rhapsody (2023) by artist HML (created during her residency at Interact Gallery in winter 2023) explores disability, gender identity, and sexuality in an attempt to fight isolation and under-representation of disabled and androgynous bodies.
Sexuality, desire, and trauma belong to a larger sphere of intimacy within one’s female/queer body, the physical spaces we inhabit, and our family or community. These spaces can be grounding or anxiety-producing, they make us feel connected or deepen our sense of isolation. Deep, a black and white photograph by Kadi Vail (2021) gives a direct insight into the individual experience of young parenthood by portraying a pregnant body in the vulnerable and soothing space of a bath. By physically prompting and forcing the viewer to assume an intimate and voyeuristic look into people’s homes, Lyn Corelle’s Single Family Homes in the Year 3030? (2020-2023) reflects upon the myriad ways that ‘home’ both comforts and constricts. While the digital chapbook of poems, Poems from ~artifact lattice~ (2023) by Madeeha Lamoreaux evokes both images of individual longing and communal sorrow, the collage series Creation in Chaos, 2021, was created by artist Kieu My Truong during peak pandemic times, as an attempt “to escape cabin fever while the world was burning” and cope with these deeps feelings of isolation.
The show has been made possible by Emily Dzieweczynski, Chris Larson, Second Shift Studio, Jocelyn Figueroa, Cameron Downey, and Zoe Cinel. Exhibition statement by Zoe Cinel.
