THE Recent recent queer figurative painting illuminated the dimensions of previously marginalized intimacy. However, visibility, also necessary, can inadvertently constrain; The risks of readability solidified in static symbolism, trapping identities in tokenized forms. The unruly dance of the form Fragment Gallery sails in this tension, swivel towards incomplete and indeterminacy on several mediums and embracing ambiguity to explore queer policy beyond the defined representation.
Exhibition exerts an intentional collapse of certainty. The forms emerge as fragments – never whole, never stable. Familiar objects such as table legs, chairs and window bars are moved and stripped of utility, suspended between functionality and ruin. Human bodies are seen in the middle in motion or balanced in a precarious way, as if it improvised meaning in real time. In the midst of omnipresent uncertainty, queerness appears to be a deliberation of solidity through the various works of eight artists.
Consider the “Graphite (Tour) leg) of Gordon Hall (2024), a single tablet in the poured concrete coated with graphite. Rather than enduring the weight, he leans with uncomfortable against a wall, resembling more shaman staff than structural support, entirely stripped of his planned function. The “bass” of Cameron Patricia Downey (2024) brings together debris from a department store closed in a strange monument. These recovered fragments, marked by trivial traces such as gum glued to surfaces, testify to temporalities that cross, simultaneously embodying the intimate memory and ideological rupture. Together, these works invoke Notion of anarchitecture of Jack HalberstamA determined dismantling of constructed forms which aims to disturb the norms around gender, power and property. By explicitly referencing the architecture, the exhibition displays its criticism of normative frameworks, illuminating how queer lives reshape the physical and ideological terrains, disturbing the structures governing the embodied experience.
In the video of Young-Jun Tak “Love Your Clean Feet Thursday” (2023), the soldiers of the Spanish Legion solemnly rise a life-size crucifix while the dancers support slowly and balance in a forest of Grunewald in Berlin, a place for the cruise. By juxtaposing the militarized religious ritual with choreographed movements, Tak exposes the inherent fragility to rigid ideological binary – male against female, sacred against profane – emphasizing how they collapse under expressions of care and interdependence embodied. By prolonging this survey materially, “warming in my entrance injuries” by Andrius Alvarez-Backus interlaces fabrics, straps and a window bar on an open injury table and vigilant looks. Reuse the Catholic devotion imaging and the evocative forms of the Glory holes and favorite equipment, Alvarez Backus re-examines and disrupts the intertwined public and private stories that discipline, erolicit and simultaneously fracture the queer incarnation.
Above all, the exhibition resists favoring any singular form. Queerness and formalism share a Loaded historical relationship: Post-war formalism, with its insistence on aesthetic autonomy and purity, has become a disputed site through which queer artists have simultaneously disturbed the established paradigms and inscribed queer sensitivities. However, these interventions have sometimes generated involuntary consequences, inadvertently strengthening the normative frameworks which they sought to dismantle. In response to this tension, the restless heterogeneity of The unruly dance of the form Remains intentionally undecided – not by indifference, but rather an active suspension of the judgment. This space of contemplation without judgment feels increasingly urgent today, because queer art faces rapid commodification and reactionary policy. By staging the collapse without resolution, the exhibition affirms that queer existence is precisely the strength of instability. Linger among the fragments is to remain attentive to the fracture, to the possibility. The ambiguity itself becomes an act of care, pointing the queerness to a transformer potential.
The unruly dance of the form Continue at the Fragment gallery (39 West 14th Street # 308, West Village, Manhattan) until May 10. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
