Queer|Art|Film Summer 2021 Season Announced

Queer|Art, New York City's home for the creative and professional development of LGBTQ+ artists, has announced the upcoming summer season of Queer|Art|Film, returning for another digital season now through August 16th. Organized by curators Adam Baran and Jeanne Vaccaro, this summer at Queer|Art|Film Club, they're making a bold assertion: Queers Are Just Better! What, you disagree? You won't after watching our in-depth discussions with our punk AF lineup, including acclaimed author Torrey Peters, experimental filmmaker Aimee Goguen and NYC icon and recent winner of the Queer|Art|Prize Award for Sustained Achievement, Julie Tolentino. Check out the queer classics that inspired them, then jointhem for compelling conversations about murderous drag performance artists, Swedish trans vampire children, lusty French sailors and oxygen-huffing sadists. There's a whole weird, queer world just under the surface, and they're going to bring its simmering stink into your homes this summer! Log in and queer out! All discussions begin at 8:00 pm EST, on Zoom, RSVP here.

Monday, June 28th

Torrey Peters presents Let the Right One In

(Tomas Alfredson, 2008)

12-year-old Oskar is regularly tormented by bullies at school and fantasizes about revenge at night. Things change when he befriends his mysterious new neighbor Eli, who only comes out after dark, has a very pale complexion, and (surprise) just may be the vampire responsible for a string of deadly local attacks. Could their bloody bond be the key to each of their survival? This 2008 Swedish coming-of-age-horror-drama is a favorite of author Torrey Peters, whose debut novel Detransition Baby is an absolute must-read book of 2021. She writes, "Let The Right One In is a film that has meant many different things to me, depending on what point in my life I watched it. It is something like a cipher--a film that reflects back at me my current preoccupations... It's been a couple years now since I've watched it, and I'm excited to discover now what it will reveal to me this time about itself, and perhaps, myself."

About Torrey Peters

Torrey Peters is the author of the novel Detransition, Baby, a national bestseller, longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, and currently in development for a TV adaptation. She also wrote the novellas Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker. Torrey rides a pink motorcycle and splits her time between Brooklyn and an off-grid cabin in Vermont.

RSVP here

Find links to watch Let the Right One In online here:

queer-art.org/streaming-links-for-qaf-summer-2021

Monday, July 19th

Julie Tolentino Presents Beau Travail

(Claire Denis, 1999)

Claire Denis created Beau Travail in response to a request by the French government to develop a film on the subject of "being foreign." Set in Djibouti, Africa, the film follows soldiers in the French Foreign Legion, and is loosely based on Herman Melville's 1888 Billy Bud. Beau Travail is a movie that marries alterity and difference, tracking the crumbling self-worth of an experienced military leader on one of his last tours. Rendering perplexing and overlapping states of disillusion, the viewer can hardly decipher between dream, fantasy, and memory in the film and Denis toys with these boundaries, shooting in a way to keep these states in constant motion. Our guest presenter, performance artist Julie Tolentino, describes Beau Travail as "the piece [she's] always wanted to make," wherein "attractions are tangled with jealousy or envy" and "memory is lost to fantasy."

About Julie Tolentino
Julie Tolentino is a performance installation maker whose work draws from a variety of visual, archival, and movement strategies. Her work has been presented at many venues, including the New Museum, The Kitchen, Danspace Project in NY; Volume, Los Angeles Contemporary, Broad at UCLA, Honor Fraser, Cypress Gallery, The Sphaerae/AXS Festival, Commonwealth & Council, The Night Gallery, Pieter, High Desert Test Sites, The Reanimation Library, The Palms in Southern California; The Lab, Joe Goode Annex, PSi Stanford in Northern California; The Wexner Center, Performa '05 and '13, and internationally in the UK, France, Germany, Philippines, Singapore, Abu Dhabi and Greece. In 2020, Tolentino was awarded the Queer|Art|Prize for Sustained Achievement.

RSVP here

Find links to watch Beau Travail online here:

queer-art.org/streaming-links-for-qaf-summer-2021

Monday, August 16th

Aimee Goguen presents Blue Velvet and Hen, His Wife

(David Lynch, 1986; Igor Kovalyov, 1990)

In David Lynch's 1986 neo-noir thriller Blue Velvet, a young man returns home and happens upon a dismembered human ear, a discovery that brings about many strange occurances, criminal encounters, and psycho-sexual awakenings. A self-fashioned detective (played by seemingly innocent Kyle MacLachlan), the young man's obsession with solving the mystery leads to a romance (with the enigmatic and tortured Isabella Rosselini) that excites and disturbs his sense of self, culminating in an emotional collision course between the straight and perverse.

For the final month of the summer season of Queer|Art|Film Club, join them for a conversation about Lynch's enduringly creepy cult classic with video artist Aimee Goguen, whose porn aesthetics and B movie style videos document kinky sexual subjection and bullying. Goguen was first introduced to the film in the 5th grade by her Aunt Janet, who gave her a VHS tape of Blue Velvet along with a copy of William Burroughs' 1959 Naked Lunch. "I knew I was on to something if I loved it and my mom hated it," Goguen says of Lynch's "slow moving action film." Blue Velvet's play of darkness and shadow felt strangely familiar to Goguen's internal sensibility and her physical surroundings in a gloomy military town in rural Washington state. She tried to figure out the lighting on her own, filming on her family's Hi-8 camera, which she still uses to shoot analog video today. Along with Blue Velvet, they will discuss the Kafka-esque short experimental animation, Hen, His Wife by Russian artist Igor Kovalyov, about a couple that receives an unexpected visitor and unwelcome revelation of the inhuman in the home.

About Aimee Goguen

Aimee Goguen is a video artist who combines analog video with animation elements. Her work often re-imagines scenarios of bullying and putrefaction as staged, repetitive actions. Her work has shown internationally including at CASSTL, Panel LA, LAXART, Vox Populi, Participant Inc., and White Columns. She co-curated Afterglow: summer video series with Harry Dodge. Recent residencies include Human Resources Los Angeles and the ONE Archives. She is currently making an experimental animation of Debbie's Barium Swallow, a short story by Laurie Weeks, in collaboration with Olivia Taussig. She earned a BFA in Film and Video and an MFA in Fine Art at The California Institute of the Arts. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

RSVP here

Find links to watch Blue Velvet and Hen, His Wife online here:

queer-art.org/streaming-links-for-qaf-summer-2021