Rural spaces have historically held multiple meanings for queer artists that push against popular depictions of rurality as an inherently incompatible and hostile anti-queer environment. Far from a conceptual or geographic monolith, rural spaces hold the potential for cultivating queerness in community building, political organizing, and artistic practice.
Amplify’s next virtual Alternate Currents panel discussion, Cultivating Queerness: Artistic Practice in Rural Places, on Zoom Wednesday, November 9th at 7pm CST, brings together artists Patrick Costello, Benjy Russell, and Jared Packard to collectively consider queer futures of coexistence during a conversation around orienting learning, materials, and relationships toward the rural.
Register here. You will receive a confirmation email with a link to join the discussion on Zoom after registering. And don’t forget to visit the Alternate Currents blog page to read up on the panel topic before the discussion.
www.amplifyarts.org/alternate-currents
Alternate Currents opens space for conversation, ideation, and action around national and international discussions in the arts that have a profound impact at the local level. Alternate Currents exists both on- and off-line in the form of a dedicated online resource, conversation series, and working group.
Free and open to all. Alternate Currents programming is presented with support from the Sherwood Foundation.
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.