K.I.S.S.I.N.G.
Digital C-print
44 x 120”
2009
(Close-up and gallery views)

Artist's Statement

Chronotopia, for me is about having the courage to imagine an optimistic queer present. For as soon as it is pictured it becomes the past and a foundation for a queerer, future. Taking queer world making as my starting point I am compelled to make work about falling in love with my partner, Libby. The inevitable failure of my photographs and drawings to capture my feelings and experience of falling in love is not lost on me, yet as I said, I am compelled to try. Through the process of making work of, about, and with Libby, I have become more aware of how her particular location in the Bay Area growing up in the Mission District of San Francisco as a Latina femme has shaped her personal history.

As a fare, femme, Mexican Libby’s hybrid subaltern identity is often illegible. This unintelligibility often leads people to identify her, mistakenly, as white and straight. In her day-to-day experience she has to come out over and over again or be repeatedly unrecognized. The erasure of her cultural, gender and sexual identity is laden with historical import; specifically assimilation, racism and gender regulation, and is not uncommon in the Bay Area given its history. The work in this exhibition seeks to problematize the simplistic binary opposition of creating visibility or being unintelligible and seek to intervene into the naturalized ideologies with which we look and read others. It invites viewers to consider critical and queerer ways of looking.

K.i.s.s.i.n.g. invokes the children’s rhyme about two people sitting in a tree, to queerly intervene into the traditional narrative of heterosexual courtship, love, marriage, family and the construction and maintenance of gender and sexuality from childhood on through the popular use of rhymes and songs such as this one. “First comes love then comes marriage then comes a baby in a baby carriage.” Depicting queer subjects but resisting an easily essetialized reading of them through the use of the crop K.i.s.s.i.n.g. disidentifies with the children’s rhyme. The figures in this image partially identify with the narrative by acting out the scenario yet, as unidentifiable queers, they do not fully embody the characters presented in the rhyme. Creating a queer version of the rhyme in a pictorial form, K.i.s.s.i.n.g disrupts the normative identity formation by calling into question what is seen as a natural progression through life of coupling, marriage and reproduction.

-- Ace Lehner