AC Discussion | Cultivating Queerness: Artistic Practice in Rural Spaces
On November 9th, artists Patrick Costello, Benjy Russell, and Jared Packard sat down to collectively consider how the mutability and pluralities of queer identity and changing attitudes toward queerness influence the ways in which queer artists operate in rural spaces. Watch the full conversation, or read through the transcript below to find links to additional resources, and share your thoughts in the comments section.
Title of Discussion: Cultivating Queerness: Artistic Practice in Rural Spaces
Panelist 1: Patrick Costello
Panelist 2: Benjy Russell
Moderator: Jared Packard
Date of Discussion: November 9th, 2022
List of Acronyms: [PC] = Patrick Costello; [BR] = Benjy Russell; [JP] = Jared Packard; [PF] = Peter Fankhauser
Transcript
[PF] Welcome everybody. I think we’re going to go ahead and get started. My name is Peter. I work here at Amplify and it’s great to have you all here for tonight’s Alternate Currents panel discussion, Cultivating Queerness: Artistic Practice in Rural Spaces with our three wonderful panelists Patrick Costello, Benjy Russell, and Jared Packard, who will also be guiding the conversation. And they’ll introduce themselves to you in just a minute.
Before that, for anybody who’s new to Amplify or joining us for the first time, we’re a nonprofit arts incubator dedicated to supporting artist-driven change.
Alternate Currents is one program that helps us do that by contextualizing national and international issues in the arts with responses from people working on the ground. Tonight’s discussion is one part of a year-long investigation of place and the environmental, economic, and social dimensions that shape our understanding of what it means to be in, of, or from a place.
Our panelists will be in conversation with each other for 40 or 45 minutes before we open the floor to questions, but the Q&A and chat functions will be active throughout so please feel free to share your thoughts anytime.
I’ll also mention quickly that a video and transcript of tonight’s discussion with links to additional articles and more resources will be posted to the Alternate Currents Blog in a couple weeks. You’ll be able to find it, and a lot of other great discussions like this one, under the ‘conversation’ tab on our homepage at www.amplifyarts.org.
So, thank you all again for being here. We really appreciate your participation and willingness to engage in critical discussion with us. Thank you to the Sherwood Foundation whose support makes Alternate Currents programming possible. And with that, I’ll pass it over to Jared.
[JP] Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Amplify Arts. I'm going to let our two amazing panelists introduce themselves. If y'all can share a little bit about your background, your practice, any kind of framing information to whet peoples’ appetites. Benji, if you want to start.
[BR] My name is Benji Russell. I'm a Choctaw Artist. I am originally from very rural Oklahoma. I grew up in the country outside of a little one-horse town with a population of around 1500 or so. I lived there for the first 25 years of my life. And I've been here in rural Tennessee for the last 14 years. Here in Tennessee, I'm very grateful to be living in an intentional rural queer community. There's a lot of queer folks who have been doing country life out here for a long time and figuring out how community works.
I'm a photographer. I do video work in sculpture as well. I work with surrealism, and I use a lot of in-camera effects. I don't do a lot of Photoshopping or post editing or anything like that. I try to do everything in-camera. A little background on my work and what informs it these days, about eight years ago, my husband and I were diagnosed with AIDS. He passed away within about eight months of our diagnosis. So, I think about this idea, this concept of how place and relationship and love evolve through death and transmutation and how we suss out what happens after this via quantum mechanics or what have you
[JP] Thank you for that, Benji. Patrick, would you like to introduce yourself?
[PC] Sure. I'm Patrick. I use he / him. I'm from Charlottesville, Virginia, but I was born in California. My dad was in the Navy, so I grew up moving around quite a bit. I grew up on military bases and suburban communities and I come from people who were farmers and worked in the military and drove trucks. I'm pretty close with my grandparents, who live in Idaho, and that was my early introduction to a more rural framework.
I live currently between New York City and Athens, New York, which is about two hours north of the city. New York City is Lenape territory and Athens is Mohican territory. I have 11 and a half acres upstate that I own with my partner, Ben. And it is an amazing piece of land that has oak-hickory forest and hardwood swamp forest and red cedar forest. At the center, we've cleared a space for a planted meadow and a bunch of different natural building projects.
A little bit about my practice, I feel like my art takes many different forms. I don't have a medium that I specialize in, but my background is in printmaking, and I do a lot of performance and installation. I think my work oftentimes comes from thinking about my body or my identity or my personal history in relation to specific ecosystems. So, there's a lot of thinking about plants and place.
[JP] Thank you. And I'm Jared Packard. I am calling in from Omaha, Nebraska. I am an artist and a curator. I'm a disenchanted painter who wants to love painting, but I'm so frustrated by it, which has really propelled me into my curatorial practice. I’m interested in how capitalism forges and unmakes identities and how we construct and perform identity.
I'm feeling a little bit like an imposter tonight because I don't have an in depth, personal history in rural spaces. I've been living in Omaha for three to four years now. So, I'm positioning myself as a learner and am eager to tease out some of the experiences you've had. But part of that experience in moving to Omaha was realizing the relativity the urban-rural spectrum. A lot of the folks I know in urban centers who found out I was moving to Omaha were like, “Oh, that's in the boonies.” And then, when I moved here, I started meeting like queer folks coming in from Western Nebraska who are like, “This is the big city.” It’s a spectrum of how we perceive and experience rural and urban conditions. I think what I'm particularly excited about in this conversation is thinking through how prevalent queer histories and narratives are synonymous with urban spaces. We think, first and foremost, of places like New York City, or San Francisco, London, or Berlin, as sites where queer identities are born and flourish. So, I'm excited to expand and broaden some of those ideas and think through what queer identities might look like, and have looked like, in less urbanized spaces. With that in mind, you both shared a little bit about the logistics of your relationship to rural spaces as queer artists. I'm wondering if you can give us a little insight into the psychological and emotional relationships you have with those places.
[BR] I grew up in a very rural area. My closest neighbor was like a little dot on the horizon miles away. So, rural space always held this fantastical, magical possibility. You are allowed so much room to run and create and do whatever you want. My art practices are always trying to create the super fantastical and magical realistic version of what we are living in. I was constantly using that as a backdrop to evolve and change landscape camera into something else using a camera, something a little more heightened and fantastical. But it was also very isolating, especially as a queer person pre-internet. It can be very lonely out there. The apps have changed that a little bit, but still queer folks don't want to live in rural areas, because there's not that much support. So, when I moved to Tennessee, into this existing community of amazing people, amazing queer folks who had already been doing it for generations out here, it changed everything. I had no idea that this could exist. I think it's informed a lot and allowed me to like look at this place as someplace that I will probably be buried or something, you know.
[JP] I'm curious to come back to that legacy that you're tapping into. Patrick, it sounds like your experience is more about straddling these two worlds of urban and rural. I'm wondering if you can give us some insight into that.
[PC] Yeah, I think even more than straddling, because I grew up moving around and because my family has different experiences of this urban rural continuum, I both heavily identify with my family's history as Idaho potato farmers and truck drivers out west, and my own little personal experience of being a community organizer in Appalachia in my 20s. Also, as a young kid, I was like, “I just want to go to where there are people like me,” and so desperately wanted to go to New York. It was the only place where I knew I'd have that. We came to New York on a class trip in eighth grade and I was like, “Oh, my gosh.” We went to Tower Records and Times Square, and I remember being like, “This is it.” So, I have this funny relationship, because it wasn't until I started to learn about places, or visit places, like where Benji lives and starting to have friends who are back-to-the-land homesteading and becoming interested in permaculture and gardening that I was like, “Oh, wait, actually, so much of what I care about is in this rural space.” Until that point, it had just been one of many options or thoughts for where I might be and live and make.
[JP] I'm really interested in this idea of what Benji called, “the magical landscape of possibility.” It seems like that's something both of you are tapping into. You talked about the history you jumped into, Benjy. Can you share what that is? I'm not very familiar the communities you're surrounded by.
[BR] I live in the middle of Tennessee on stolen Yuchi land. Part of the Back-to-Land Movement that happened in the 70s trickled into this rural area because land was so cheap. One of my neighbors, who's one of the elders here, found this place placed in an ad in Mother Earth News back in the 70s that said land is cheap, there's water everywhere, if anybody wants to form a community, come on out. So, the Radical Fairies set up a community at Short Mountain Sanctuary. It’s a cis gay male separatist movement that came out of the 60s that plays with sexuality and gender and drag and all these things. There's probably dozen residents who live there full time. They host several large gatherings a year where queer, gay folks come out from all over the world to revel in nature and get right with goddess and all that. There's also another community nearby called Ida, which is more of a Black trans anarchist kind of vibe. They're both doing amazing work right now and there's a lot of evolution happening in the process. It's been so cool to watch.
[JP] That makes me wonder what that kind of environment has done for your creative practices. I'm wondering if you can share a little bit about how you you've grown as an artist, or you see these spaces as like a foundation for what you're doing creatively?
[PC] So, I bought land in Athens because I had been living collectively in in New York City for almost eight years. We had gardens on the rooftop, and a big warehouse space where we built out the rooms ourselves. And I was really interested in the way this tiny community of people that I was living with were making our own little world within the larger city. I like that, in a rural space, or with a land project, you're immediately expected to do that. You have to. There's no other option if you want to be able to literally sleep indoors. I was really craving the kinds of skills and knowledge that I think rural living and land projects enable. I wanted to know more about the plants and the mushrooms and animal identification. I wanted to tap sugar maples to make syrup. I wanted to compost my poop. I wanted to make big spectacles in collaboration with moths and people and creatures of the night. I wanted to have a brass band come out of the woods. I didn’t want anyone to tell me I can't. I wanted to know the ways in which I could increase the number of pollinators in a space. All of those things felt like creative acts, and they only felt possible if I were had access to a larger outdoor space. That's where that intersection is for me.
[BR] I shoot a lot of my work outdoors. Nature kind of acts as the subject and backdrop of everything. It informs all of the work. Being out here for such an extended period of time, you get to watch how the seasons change. Suddenly, you notice the smallest nuance. The buttercups are about to flush, or a new bird stopped in. Those things can prompt work. You are really studying the smallest, tiniest shift in seasons or in the environment and it prompts long-form work. I like to say that nature is the muse, but it's also the subject.
[PC] It is long-form. The timescale is so different than it is in the city.
[BR] It really is. You notice as soon as the season is shifting direction. I just closed a huge show here at my house with all this work during the pandemic. I didn't want to show it in a gallery space, so I started growing this 7,000 square foot garden, which anchored this show. I printed all the photographs on outdoor fabric and displayed them around the wildflower plantings. I invited people into my home, very intimately, showed them this work that dealt with a lot of very complicated and complex issues while surrounded by butterflies. I hadn't pictured my work going in that direction, but it's been lovely. I love having this place as a gallery space. I think I'm going to keep doing it. There'll be a place out here in the country where people can come and look at amazing art in nature and dream a little bit.
[JP] That’s such a stark contrast to the hierarchical institutional models we're accustomed to. It makes me think about the institutional skepticism that has been refreshed and reawakened in recent years across the political spectrum. Most notably, in this context, the skepticism of the art world and how art world institutions are not falling short in their promises to their communities or their artists. I'm curious to hear a little bit more about some of the rewards of operating outside of institutions. Patrick?
[PC] That's interesting. One of the things I think about is that if I want to continue contributing to a discourse, or to a framework that includes conversations outside of just my house or my piece of land, then there's always going to be a tension there. I'm never going to be able to escape it by going to the woods. I'm also interested learning to intentionally invite those frameworks into the woods, or into my land project.
One project I did with a bunch of collaborators involved inviting a bunch of scientists from Cornell and friends from Philly to our land. I made an event happen with my collaborator Ash Ferlito, who is an artist based in Ithaca, New York. We hosted this big thing called Moth Ball that was a seven-course banquet dinner on big, long tables set in the field. All of the food was moth themed. We made all the tablecloths out of cyanotypes and there were all these artists from the from all over the place that were involved. The banquet dinner culminated in an original song written by my friend Chanda, that we all sang together to call in the moths. Then, we engaged in this activity called mouthing, which is a low-tech scientific activity where you turn a light on a white sheet and moths flock to it. That's actually how scientists track and identify moth populations in an area because moth species are nocturnal and respond to light in that way. We had all these scientists then go around and identify moths--the performance really began at that point in the darkness.
I lost my train of thought because I was talking about Moth Ball. I get so worked up when I'm talking about Moth Ball.
[JP] I can understand how you lose track of things because that was really fascinating. But I asked about the rewards of operating outside of institutional systems.
[PC] Ah, so I guess, to me, that event sort of holds those tensions within it. I'm making an art project, I'm involving actual people from actual institutions, and from New York City, and from all these places. And it's specifically very much about this hyper local place and the more-than-human species and creatures that live there. That's how I'm approaching that question of moving away from a city or moving away from a certain kind of framework that feels oppressive. The rural space just allows me to interface with it in a more intentional way.
[BR] It took me a little longer to get to a point where I recognized the richness of creating work and not being reliant on institutions. I moved here from LA. I moved from Oklahoma to LA for four or five years. When I was in LA, I was getting all of these opportunities thrown at me, you know, like international shows. At some point, I decided I needed to move back to the country, because that's where my heart's at. As soon as I moved back here, within six months or so, every single opportunity dried up. Every single offer for a show dried right up. If you are not in their faces, and if you're not at those events, and you're not at the shows, then like people, especially people who make decisions, don't really remember who you are. At this point, I haven't really shown in a gallery in probably eight years. Nobody's asking me, you know. I'm not at hyper-networker, obviously, because I live in the middle of nowhere. So, I show when the opportunity presents itself. I don't stop making work. It doesn't slow the process down at all. I just find new ways to exhibit.
[JP] I asked about the rewards of working in rural spaces, but I think you're both pointing to some of the limitations too. That is a helpful dichotomy to hold in the same space. When you talk about the richness of making worth work, there is something, for lack of a better word, almost pure about operating without these external forms of validation.
[BR] Because you're not reliant on anything other than the work, other than the message. That's all that's important. There's a level of purity in that, I guess.
[PC] It also points to the fact that within queer communities, in rural and in urban spaces, there's always been this heightened attribution to subcultural spaces that are “just for us.” In a rural space, you really get to calibrate who that “just for us” is. I get to decide that the audience is the pollinators in my wildflower garden. It’s the people who come to visit me to see the work. There's this opportunity to really be specific about who the work is for and how it gets presented. I don't know if I would call it purity, but it is potent because it all feels muddled to me as a person who's working between urban and rural spaces.
[JP] I really liked that intentionality and specificity around community and the work that you're making in rural spaces. I think about how urban centers are heralded as hubs of innovation, because there is this influx of different cultural backgrounds and the possibility of encountering new ideas, but I'm really resonating and appreciating the foil to that, a space for intentionality, which feels so challenging to realize in a digital age.
I'm curious to hear a little bit more about the possibilities for communing with and learning from non-human entities. You mentioned mushrooms or flowers or butterflies. I'm curious about what other inspiration or projects have emerged from those relationships.
[BR] When I first moved here to Tennessee, there was this spot where I'd go and pee off the front porch every morning. After a few months, I noticed that’s where all the butterflies gathered. So, I came up with the idea I wanted to show the juxtaposition of beauty rough masculinity. So, my husband, or my boyfriend at the time, for two weeks straight every morning, we'd go out there and pee on my chainsaw. Then, we suspended it with magician's wire in the woods. Within 20 or 30 minutes of hanging this piss-soaked chain saw, all these butterflies came in and started eating minerals and urea deposited on it. I love that ritual. That was the birth of the relationship but I never would have put two and two together if I hadn’t started peeing off the porch.
[PC] I know they tell you that being an artist is very lucrative and glamorous. So far, the glamorous part is true, but it’s not so lucrative, so I make my money working in horticulture. I never had a job in New York City where I worked indoors until just this September. I work with plants, and I guess I would say I have some expertise around plants. So, going to a space where I can both witness what comes up naturally and work with it with my years of expertise has been so cool. I've translated that knowledge and experience into a series of sculptures that are gardens. I'm interested in what it looks like to make art that is purely plant based, and that will go away. And so that's the thing that has flourished in my practice since we've gotten land.
[JP] That makes me think about one thing we haven't touched on yet: our current ecological crisis. I'm curious about questions around living sustainably or living off grid. How do you see your creative practice engaging some of those concerns?
[BR] I think when you live in a rural area, you automatically at some point look at yourself as the caretaker of the land and try to facilitate what the weird little microclimates within it need, and what the birds need, and what the plants want to live there. I don't think you can help that. You can't battle nature. You turn yourself over to it, and you start to just take care of it and do the best you can.
[PC] Yeah, I think, in terms of climate crisis, people in rural and urban communities all over the world are starting to experience the disasters and intense changes that we're going to see more of. And that was definitely part of my reasoning for wanting to start a land project. When there is a crisis, and people are migrating out of cities, I want to be able to give them a place to be. When there are situations where we can take care of the land, like Benji was saying, I want to use my body to do that. It sort of feels like all of these questions around climate change bring up, for me, what it looks like to be a steward of land and of place, whether you live rurally or in an urban space. I don't know how much we can actually do when it's so far outside of our control, when individual actions like recycling are basically doing nothing in comparison to like large corporations and polluters. It makes me think about we steward the places in which we live. What does it look like to remediate or kind compost ideas of being detached from those processes? How can we embed ourselves in those conversations again? I think that is an exciting thing.
[BR] It's like a legacy, you know. It’s not something that you will necessarily reap all the benefits of, but it's the best way to impact global change, global good, on whatever scale you can.
[PC] One of the things I panicked about buying land upstate was being a landowner, being a rural gentrifier, being a sort of colonizer on stolen land. And all of these things are true. They're all tensions that this project holds within it, but also, you have this opportunity to act on a scale where you're able to ask, “Is this gentrification?” If I'm making a queers space for people who traditionally have not felt welcome or safe? That turns the question on its head a little bit. Am I a settler if I'm trying to make as much space as possible for all the other creatures that live here? Am I a colonizer if I'm collaborating with Indigenous communities that were forcibly removed from this land? Yes. And there's more.
[BJ] And if you hadn’t bought that land, somebody else would have. They might have clear cut it and sold the lumber off or something, you know?
[PC] Right. Yeah, it's complicated.
[JP] We're all in it. We can't get out. That's what I keep thinking. We can’t get out of it. We're working within capitalism and have to intervene to the best of our advantage. You put it very succinctly, Benji. I’m interested to hear more about the possibilities for queer rural futures. What does that look like to you?
[BR] Well, when I moved to Tennessee, it was to start an artist residency program out in the woods. We had an amazing three- or four-year run of that, and it was fantastic. It ended in 2011 or so. Now I’m working on the studios here to start a queer artists residency program that will hopefully carry on after I'm gone and hold space in the country for queer people, BIPOC folks, trans folks who don't get to tromp off through the woods whenever they want. That was the best part of the residency program, watching everybody's brains explode when they had unfettered access to acres and acres of creeks and woods and streams. I think we have to set the bar. We have to create spaces that are safe for Black, Brown and trans bodies because black brown and trans bodies do not necessarily feel welcome out here, especially in rural areas. Especially with the uptick in all the hate speech and what's going on in politics. It's should be the number one thing we work for.
[PC] I agree with that. We make it a priority on the land to host opportunities for learning and collaborative projects, that center Black, queer and trans voices. Even if it's a project that I didn't start, or that Ben didn't start, we invite people to come to the land and start their thing. Make it happen, because it's really important to us that this lease of land helps people feel safe in the possibility for creative intervention or building their own practice
[JP] I think something that we're tapping into while thinking about creating safe space for Black, Brown, trans folks, is the political assumptions tied to rural spaces. I certainly had some fears moving to Omaha. I fortunately have not felt unsafe here. But it sounds like the process of unlearning that association of the rural as like an unsafe space for queer people, is a really important one.
Do you have projects coming up you’d like to share? Plug yourselves.
[PC] Well, I know Moth Ball is going to happen again. It's not just a one evening event, but a run of theatrical performances, more like a play.
I’ve also become obsessed with natural building processes. I'm learning how to timber frame from a bunch of friends who are teaching a us how to do it on our land. Between that, and learning a little bit about Cobb, I'm thinking about living architecture that that decomposes. I'd really love to make some spaces that that look like giant cakes. And that cakes are for the earth. We don't eat them. We hang out in them and eventually they go back into the earth. So, I'm working on installing a cake for the Earth hopefully next summer in Cazenovia. New York at a sculpture park there.
[BR] Well, I just had this huge show come down, so I'm not quite ready to embark on a whole bunch of new work, but I've got a show coming up in Australia during their Pride celebration in January, February. They invited all these like queer Indigenous artists from different continents to show work that deals with language and text and all the different iterations it takes.
I also just had a book published that deals with the show I had here at the house. It deals with a lot with my husband who passed away and sharing this house together. During the pandemic, he kind of started coming back around and taking up space and being all flirty and stuff again.
I'm working on a guest room before the artists residency gets starts so I can figure out what I need to do to safely house artists of all different needs and all different mediums.
[JP] We love hearing about what you both have coming up.
I was wondering, as we were talking about creating safe spaces, have either of you had encounters with folks from the communities that there? How do they perceive your creative endeavors? And what are those conversations like?
[BR] Well, the local rural community in Tennessee doesn't really seek out a lot of art or understanding of art. There's not a lot of exchange there. The queer community loves it. They're huge fans of weird art.
[PC] We have had a pretty interesting time because our 11 Acres is right outside of a very small town, Athens, NY. When we did Moth Ball, we interfaced with a local arts organization, the Athens Cultural Council, and so people affiliated with that have come and seen what we've been doing. I would say it's been interesting because the way our land is shaped, you can't see our neighbors on either side, but you can kind of hear them. It's a long, narrow rectangle, and narrow being a relative term but pretty narrow. We have had some interesting rural neighbor encounters since we've moved there, some of which have been incredibly heartening, and so cool and drew upon all of my years of experience dealing with folks in central Virginia and pulling out that my dad was in the military to find common ground. And then others have been totally terrifying. So we navigate that. I always joke that one of the things I didn't know going into this was that I would be dealing with so many straight, white men. My own white masculinity makes it easier for me to do this project in relation to our neighbors because I am constantly interfacing with white men, straight white men in a way that I really never had before. If we need a guy with an excavator, if we need the driveway plowed, it always ends up bringing that energy into the space, inevitably. It's been really, really weird. Heartening and cool, but also weird.
As a white, cis, gay man, I have all of the things that help me pass in the hierarchies we all navigate. But it’s interesting having these moments of I don't pass all the time. It's very present in the overall space.
[JP] A lot of what you shared was really inspiring and enchanting in many ways. What advice would you give to queer folks who are wanting to spend more time in rural spaces or maybe start their own rural community?
[BR] Visit some communities, if you can. Dip in and see how people have already built before you rebuild the wheel. Historically, communities have a life expectancy of 15 years before they go kaput, before they burnout ,before nobody wants to be full-time residents. The ones with longer lifespans have done a lot of shit right. I think checking on queer communities that already exist in rural areas is a good place to start.
[PC] I agree with that. I'd also say, even if you have all the skills that you think you need, and even if you're really gung-ho about going out and making a thing happen, it's really hard. It's way harder than I thought it was going to be. And I thought I was pretty prepared because I have an amazing community of skilled friends, many of whom live virtually and have homesteading and off grid projects. Many of them have also interfaced with like long standing queer rural communities. But anytime you're embarking on a project of living, regardless of where it is, it gets hard. It gets hard because there's so many physical and emotional resources involved in living rurally. Have your wits about you and your community, hold your community close and also email me or, or get in touch with somebody who's trying it. And come visit, see what we're doing wrong. You'll come and be like, “Wow, I'm never doing it like that.” And that will be helpful. So, please come. The thing that makes rural living so cool is having lots of people there with you.
[JP] Thank you for that. So many gestures of queer refusal are invisible. I'm so appreciative and grateful for this conversation to shed some light on the inspiring aspects of the projects that you're working on. Thank you for your generosity, thoughtfulness, and sensitivity. I really appreciated it.
[BJ] Thank you so much. Queer people in rural areas for the win. Let's take over.
[JP] It's been such a pleasure. Thank you both.
*This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
About the Panelists:
Patrick Costello: Rooted in collaboration and performance, and often incorporating his background in printmaking, Patrick Costello’s work spans the disciplines of drawing, sculpture, gardening, and theater. Making projects informed by queer and intersectional feminist practices, he collaborates with other artists, participants, and viewers to create spaces for collective transformation, wild imagining, and utopian possibility. These attempts at temporary world-building are ephemeral moments to remember how to feel human at this time in history, and how to practice what our humanity might ask of us.
Patrick completed his MFA in Combined Media at Hunter College in 2018 and earned a BA in Printmaking from the University of Virginia in 2008.
Patrick’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 601 Artspace (New York), Second Street Gallery (Charlottesville), and Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens), as well as independent and alternative spaces nationally and abroad including Cinema Balash (Brooklyn), Space 1026 (Philadelphia), and Trance Pop (Tokyo). He has performed in venues including Ars Nova (New York), the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center (Waterford), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia), Space Gallery (Portland), Ohranimo Tovarno Rog (Ljubljana), and a sheep farm in Waikawa, New Zealand. Patrick has held residencies with New City Arts (Charlottesville), ACRE (Chicago), and HewnOaks Artist Colony (Lovell). Patrick lives and works in a seven-person collective house in Brooklyn, where he maintains a small wildflower meadow on the roof.
Benjy Russell: Benjy Russell is a Choctaw artist who grew up in rural Oklahoma, and currently resides in rural Tennessee. As a gay man living in rural landscapes he has found a thriving and diverse community of queer and trans people with whom to vision the new world. The friendships that form his community have become important as subject matter, inspiration, source material, and space for collaboration.
He’s compelled by the intersection of philosophy, science, and art— a way to see the world prismatically and to unlearn harmful, antiquated social structures. He looks to science fiction as a model for how we can shape the future we want. By creating a fictionalized version of the future we desire, we take the first step towards its existence.
Most of his work utilizes in-camera effects, using sculpture, studio lights, and mirrors to allude to magical realism. By creating a physical moment of impossibility, he holds it up to the rest of the world to show what else is possible. His work points to some of the joy inherent in this life, showing it to be as much of the present moment as it is of the future.
Jared Packard: Jared Packard is an artist and curator based in Omaha, NE where he is the Exhibitions Manager at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Packard completed his BA at Clark University and his MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has curated the NEA-funded unLOCK: Merging Art and Industry, Lockport, IL; an urban curatorial experiment, Stumble Chicago; the nationally traveling exhibition, ReTooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection; and (Re)Flex Space, Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL. He has shown his work at ADDS DONNA, Chicago, IL; Baltimore Gallery, Detroit, MI; Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL; Centre International d’Art Contemporain, Pont-Aven, France; Hillyer Art Space, Washington, D.C.; Shiltkamp Gallery, Worcester, MA.