Come, Dance With Us and Our Dead In The Rainbows (If It Makes You Feel Good)

Curated by Cait McCormack, Christopher M Tandy and Heather Renée Russ

invited artists:

The World is Dead. Long Live the Queers. More than one thing is true. There is more than 0 and 1.

Energy recycles itself in all directions, not just linearly. Technology morphs into nature. Nature morphs into technology. There is no difference. Queerness. A mystical technology that defies binary organizational thought systems. It has always been so.

Queerness is by nature; a challenge - to grow and announce your existence in a world that would and will, kill you. How does a history preserve when it is consistently eradicated? It codes itself into flesh, into stories of bricks and death and joy, of loss and love. It codes itself in the animals, the trees, into light, it builds a technology that does not burn and instead, continuously transforms itself. 

Mystical beliefs are at play throughout all world religions, cults and politics - using “knowledge” as a way to leverage power; secrets and fear transformed, and as if touched by Midas, turned into gold. All of these systems place one group in opposition to another, or in control of another. With it’s entirety Queerness is a rejection of predatory and capitalistic systems, colonized ways of thinking and programmed belief structures. This is survival. This is evolution. The acronym we use highlights the differences between us, subverts the idea that said differences separate us, responding : “it doesn’t matter who you like, love, fuck. All that matters is that you come here - these spaces, these bodies, this planet - honestly and in solidarity with it, with each other.” 

The rainbow is a code: a technology, a language, a symbol for Queerness; expressing said defiance and at once, presenting a type of mystical awareness - that we are inexorably linked to this planet, the animals on it, and each other. Regardless of whether it is being co-opted for the monetary benefit of corporate sponsors (Gotta get those Gay dollars!) or operates as a bridge between the realms of the living and the dead, the rainbow has transfigured into a symbol of Queerness Unified, carrying with it all of the history, rage, power and possibility of a people that have made defiance a way of life.

With Come, Dance With Us and Our Dead In The Rainbows (If It Makes You Feel Good) Cait McCormack, Heather Renée Russ, and Christopher M Tandy form a double triad with three fellow Queers; Rainbow decals glitch across white walls, a disco ball hangs inside a chroma field overlooking Queer Primordial Monoliths alongside drawings and collages containing secret languages, arranged in triangular figurations, as if  Queer DNA Technology.

McCormack’s hand-dyed, crocheted fantastical specimens are splayed out across a field of technicolor mutation, hybridizing unusual life forms with divine sensibilities. Russ’ large scale print mirrors, or is possibly the origin point of the glitches throughout the room, evoking questions concerning the technology of evolution and opening portals to Queer ghosts, dancing in defiance and joy - a remnant of lost voices. Glitches weave themselves into Tandy’s drawings, a layer of graphite twists over a black field - a hybrid creature, story, glyph emerging from the page, only when approached, like a rainbow, from a particular angle. Vincent Tiley’s vision drawings are based on the idea of Scrying - the oracular practice of gazing into a reflective or clear surface (like a crystal or disco ball) in order to receive information or messages from the future. Witch Technology fused with homo tendency floats on top of painted mirrored surfaces forming an indecipherable but known language for the exhibition; rainbows dancing - phantoms on the wall. Caitlin Rose Sweet’s ceramic sculptures are visceral forms clawing at their surroundings and give voice to the rage of feminine labor being exploited. The vessels are anything but passive,  part craft, part beast; they refuse to perform expected functions and instead, open space for bodies to transgress containment. Rochelle Voyle’s hand cut collage pieces warp together elements from constructed and natural worlds, a beautiful destruction that leaves the viewer needing to reconcile reality - a very shared and very Queer experience, let us assure you.

Queerness is technology. Queers have always utilized subversion in order to survive in the heteronormative world. We have depended on hand gestures, hanky codes, and secret passwords in order to build community, to skirt eradication. Come, Dance With Us and Our Dead In The Rainbows (If It Makes You Feel Good) presents the alchemy of transmuting trauma into vessels and images encoded with not just personal experience, but ancestral - reconciling harms and truths, providing a means to build ourselves out of the very fire we have been thrown into for generations.. Queerness is a vision that unites through time, through space and people, it is a vision shared and it is the most advanced technology we have access to.