Date of Submission

Spring 2016

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Studio Arts

Project Advisor 1

Jeffrey Gibson

Abstract/Artist's Statement

To explain, in a phrase, Marginalia is a space of queer esotericism. These terms may be evocative at best; rational understanding, through careful language, is inherently at odds with Marginalia itself.

Queerness, esotericism— both are nebulous terms because they invoke rejection and subversion as a means of orientation. They are always antitheses. They reject canon where it comfortably stands: the canon of contemporary aesthetics, of rationality, of identity, sexuality and body. Marginalia, as much as it is able, exists explicitly and intentionally outside the narratives that we are most familiar with.

Estranging itself from normative structures, Marginalia is given the room to flourish a grotesque decadence and indulge in its own spectacle. It exposes itself, forgets concerns for lewdness, for inclusivity, for limit or shame. It embraces ornament, sensuality, confusion, myth and mysticism.

In the search for a valid sense of queer inheritance and identity, rejection is not necessarily an act of anger or retaliation, but an attempt to re-create. Marginalia operates through queer necessities for imagination, secrecy, self-determination and unreality.

We must make do with tantalizing fragments, scattered across time and place; histories only glimpsed, congealed into a re-imagined space of belonging. A sensibility much like a fantastic weed pruned or suppressed again and again, only to reappear, in flower.

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