The latest rise of queer figurative portray has illuminated beforehand marginalized dimensions of intimacy. But visibility, nevertheless needed, can inadvertently constrain; legibility dangers solidifying into static symbolism, trapping identities inside tokenized kinds. The Unruly Dance of Type at Fragment Gallery navigates this rigidity, pivoting towards incompletion and indeterminacy throughout a number of mediums and embracing ambiguity to discover queer politics past outlined illustration.
The exhibition phases an intentional collapse of certainty. Types emerge as fragments — by no means complete, by no means steady. Acquainted objects reminiscent of desk legs, chairs, and window bars are displaced and stripped of utility, suspended between performance and break. Human our bodies are glimpsed mid-motion or precariously balanced, as if improvising which means in real-time. Amid pervasive uncertainty, queerness emerges as a deliberate unraveling of solidity throughout the varied works of eight artists.
Set up view of Gordon Corridor, “Graphite Covered Leg (Turned)” (2024), forged concrete, graphite
Think about Gordon Corridor’s “Graphite Covered Leg (Turned)” (2024), a single forged concrete desk leg coated with graphite. Slightly than supporting weight, it leans uneasily in opposition to a wall, resembling extra a shaman’s workers than structural help, stripped fully of its meant perform. Cameron Patricia Downey’s “Bass” (2024) gathers particles from a shuttered division retailer into an uncanny monument. These reclaimed fragments, marked by mundane traces reminiscent of gum caught to surfaces, bear witness to intersecting temporalities, concurrently embodying intimate reminiscence and ideological rupture. Collectively, these works invoke Jack Halberstam’s notion of anarchitecture, a purposeful dismantling of constructed kinds that seeks to unsettle norms round gender, energy, and possession. By explicitly referencing structure, the exhibition sharpens its critique of normative frameworks, illuminating how queer lives reshape bodily and ideological terrains, disrupting the buildings governing embodied expertise.
In Younger-jun Tak’s video “LOVE YOUR CLEAN FEET ON THURSDAY” (2023), Spanish Legion troopers solemnly hoist a life-sized crucifix whereas dancers gently help and steadiness each other’s our bodies in a Grunewald forest in Berlin, a spot for cruising. By juxtaposing militarized non secular ritual with choreographed actions, Tak exposes the fragility inherent in inflexible ideological binaries — masculine versus female, sacred versus profane — highlighting how they collapse below embodied expressions of care and interdependence. Extending this inquiry materially, Andrius Alvarez-Backus’s “Warming Into My Entry Wounds” (2025) interweaves flesh-toned materials, straps, and a window bar right into a charged tableau of open wounds and watchful gazes. Repurposing Catholic devotional imagery and shapes evocative of gloryholes and fetish gear, Alvarez-Backus reexamines and unsettles intertwined private and non-private narratives that concurrently self-discipline, eroticize, and fracture queer embodiment.
Crucially, the exhibition resists privileging any singular type. Queerness and formalism share a fraught historic relationship: Postwar formalism, with its insistence on aesthetic autonomy and purity, grew to become a contested web site by which queer artists concurrently disrupted established paradigms and inscribed queer sensibilities. But these interventions sometimes generated unintended penalties, inadvertently reinforcing the normative frameworks they sought to dismantle. In response to this rigidity, the stressed heterogeneity of The Unruly Dance of Type stays deliberately indecisive — not by indifference, however slightly an energetic suspension of judgment. This house for contemplation with out judgment feels more and more pressing at the moment, as queer artwork faces speedy commodification and reactionary politics. By staging collapse with out decision, the exhibition asserts that queer existence attracts energy exactly from instability. To linger amongst fragments is to stay attentive to fracture, to risk. Ambiguity itself turns into an act of care, pointing queerness towards transformative potential.
Set up views of Cameron Patricia Downey, “Bass” (2024), metal, chrome, bench, movie
Set up view of The Unruly Dance of Type, that includes works by Younger-jun Tak (left) and Andrius Alvarez-Backus, “Warming Into My Entry Wounds” (2025), reclaimed textiles, reclaimed iron window bar, charcoal, coloured pencil, tempera on pine wooden panel (photograph by Daniel Greer, courtesy the artists and Fragment Gallery)
Set up view of The Unruly Dance of Type (photograph by Daniel Greer, courtesy the artists and Fragment Gallery)
The Unruly Dance of Type continues at Fragment Gallery (39 West 14th Avenue #308, West Village, Manhattan) by Could 10. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
