'Queer Magnetism' is 'vast and polychromatic' but not overwhelming

SANTA FE — The notion that LGBTQ+ individuals tend to gravitate toward one another naturally to form communities is known colloquially as “queer magnetism.” Like “gaydar,” it is not a scientific concept. The truth is, building and sustaining any type of community, queer or otherwise, takes effort. As an organizing principle for an art show, though, the magnet metaphor is conceptually rich.

The co-curators of “Queer Magnetism,” Carmen Selam (Yakama Nation) and Jordan Eddy, have grouped their exhibition’s 40 artists into four sections — dimensional, figurative, biomorphic and temporal — which they call “magnetic centers.” Akin to the 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblances, these are loose, open-ended groupings, with some artists appearing in multiple sections of the show. As Selam and Eddy write in their curatorial statement, “Defining one overarching approach or ethic is beside the point — our spectrum is too vast and polychromatic.”

Full disclosure: Eddy is my friend. This summer, I wrote an account of an evening together, titled “Two art critics see ‘Rigoletto’ at Santa Fe Opera” in the July 20 edition of The Sunday Journal. But friendship has never stopped me from being harsh in my critiques. When Eddy first told me the scope of his and Selam’s curatorial ambition, to be honest, I expected a dumpster fire. A scholarly survey of queer art with dozens of artists, including historical ones, all crammed together in the relatively small Santa Fe Community Gallery? Yipes.

For each magnetic center, the curators include at least one historic New Mexican artist as a spiritual antecedent, or foil, for the living artists. For instance, the historical anchor for the figurative section is Max-Carlos Martinez, a much-loved painter, who hosted salons for artists and writers, and who died in 2020. Several of the works in the figurative section are self-portraits. Asa Benson-Core’s confident self-portrait in watercolor combines fluid linework with an ornate background that looks almost like cloisonné. Emily Rankin’s “Blue Hole,” by contrast, is a haunting portrait of social anxiety and self-effacement. Both are wonderful.

The biomorphic section is slightly weaker than the others, but pieces by c marquez, Kimberly Sewell and the mononymic Moss are standouts. Agnes Martin is the historic artist here, and having her work on view in a community gallery is quite a coup for the curators. I only wish they could have gotten their hands on one of Martin’s 1950s-era curvilinear works that they reference in their wall text, as opposed to the one they did get, a lithograph that looks like a sheet of musical staff paper. To call this piece “biomorphic” is a stretch, even if Martin said she “happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees” when she made it.

In the dimensional section, photographs of the 19th-century two-spirit textile artists We’wha (Zuni) and Hastiin Tl’a (Diné) hang next to a recent weaving by trans nonbinary artist dylan lilla. Lilla’s woven assemblage of gloopy, Hans Arp-like shapes could just as easily go in the biomorphic section, but placing it in conversation with We’wha and Tl’a reveals surprising connections across temporal and cultural divides. For all three artists, it seems, the practice of weaving is inextricably bound with their nonbinary identities.

The textile artist Amanda Curreri is included here, as well. Her re-creations of vintage 1990s-era posters from the activist group Queer Nation should not be reduced to their textual message, so placing them in the “dimensional” category alongside the work of other queer weavers is an inspired choice that focuses attention back on the materiality of the work.

Other notable pieces in the dimensional section include J. Matthew Thomas’ Frankensteinian sewing patterns — which I first saw at the “Out Taos” exhibition in June at the Taos Center for the Arts, and which I absolutely love. There is also the trans nonbinary artist Polina Smutko’s “Warehouse of Desire,” a nightmarish but utterly transfixing sculpture of rusted metal and flashing fluorescent lights. It looks like a giant bug zapper from a David Cronenberg-style technological horror film. Since I arrived late to the opening, I thought the gallery managers were flashing the overhead lights for us to leave before eventually realizing it was just Smutko’s sculpture. Funny how we’ve all been trained to leave when lights flash, while the very same signal attracts moths and fireflies. “Warehouse of Desire,” then, makes literal the attraction-repulsion dialectic inherent in the curators’ statement: “Each artwork … attract(s) some ideas and stories while repelling others.”

Finally, the temporal section is anchored by the work of Tigre Mashaal-Lively, a highly imaginative artist whose death by suicide in 2022 was a great loss to the Santa Fe arts community. Their monumental 8,000-pound sculpture, “Facing the Fear Beast,” is installed at Art City, a sculpture park in Tucumcari. In “Queer Magnetism,” Mashaal-Lively’s drawing of an intersex humanoid play-wrestling with an intersex lion recalls similarly stylized zoophilic imagery from ancient Greek pottery. It fits well with the other works in this section, most of which employ mythological themes.

I was a bit thrown by the word “temporal,” though, since only one of the pieces — Cris E. Vargas’ excellent short documentary, “Sincerely, Mary” — is time-based. I guess the idea is that mythology belongs to the ancient past, so the artists in this section are crossing temporal boundaries by bringing myth-making into the present. In any case, it’s one of my favorite sections. I love Ocelotl Mora’s “La Trans Cena,” a surreal tableau vivant, loosely based on Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” which incorporates symbols representing the artist’s Chicano and transmasculine identities, including an Aztec headdress, a leather harness and an ofrenda.

Benson-Core reappears in this section with another jewel-toned watercolor, titled “Pixie Party,” which depicts a sylvan scene of flying and seated pixies — some with multiple breasts and eyes — gathering around the head of a decapitated cop, a beguiling mix of beauty and violence. Hugo Ximello-Salido’s portraits of the artist Frida Kahlo and the 17th-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, meanwhile, are sweetly devotional. The artist has placed each face at the center of a resplandor, a frilly Oaxacan headdress reminiscent of an Elizabethan ruff.

Bringing together 40 artists, historical and contemporary, whose work spans disparate styles and media is no easy task. For such an exhibition to actually say something meaningful about queer art in New Mexico without a dissertation’s worth of text panels is even tougher. Yet it succeeds.

The magnet metaphor keeps Selam and Eddy’s categories from becoming too rigid. Their brief, poetic texts give just enough intellectual scaffolding to keep audiences from feeling unmoored but not so much that we’re worn out from all the reading, or worse, made to feel that we’re being dictated to. For such a scrupulously organized show, nothing about it feels overdetermined or prescriptive. “Queer Magnetism” is as open and elastic as queerness itself.

'Queer Magnetism' is 'vast and polychromatic' but not overwhelming