Christopher Stout Queer Abstraction Art Group Exhibition III John Jeffery Bernd

Caption: Installation image of this series of paintings as shown at Equity Gallery October 2021.

III (THREE), a reexamination of the work and queer personhood of John Jeffery Berndt
Artist Notes (Part 1):

These 5 paintings were first shown at Equity Gallery in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan in October of 2021. Here are the research notes that I sent in preparation for the showing:

The 5 paintings that comprise III (THREE), a reexamination of the work and queer personhood of John Jeffery Bernd are series works. This manner of creative output is an intrinsic part of my artistic practice. I delight in making bodies of work with very similar physical outcomes.
As a precursor to this knowledge sharing about these paintings, we should first embark on a brief conversation about my artistic practice in queer abstraction and the definition of the term.

I am an artist who works in queer abstraction, which might be most easily understood as activist art about the queer experience that does not employ representation of the human figure. Queer abstraction, along with Black abstraction, Feminist abstraction, and even Arte Povera are 4 distinct types of sociopolitical protest work birthed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which primarily eschew the use of figuration.

Queer abstraction has been primarily a very esoteric artform that over the last few years has suddenly begun to receive more academic focus and art world attention. Nearly every article I have read over the last several years concerning queer abstraction is prone to contextualize what queer abstraction isn’t … it isn’t informed by AIDS art generation work, it isn’t expressed by representation of the body, it does not employ the conventionally understood discourse of queer sexuality to shorthand representation of the queer experience.
Here are some timely examples of this:

https://brooklynrail.org/2017/10/artseen/Queering-Queer-Abstraction
https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/queer-abstraction-travis-jeppesen-2019/
http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=4468

These same writings are also captivated and proponents of this reclaimed activation by queer artists exhuming this rather esoteric way of making work from the late 1960’s (most often by lesbian artists) and reincarnating it to manifest conversations representing our new (art) activism. In addition, this art genre often seeks to convey and engage in the more robust telling of the abundance of queerness in in addition to the elation found within our sexual liberation.

To make this more personal, the paintings in III, a reexamination of the work and queer personhood of John Jeffery Bernd are a continuance of my investigation of enunciating, discovering, and forging relationships between queer abstraction and other genres of art made by queer artists.

With the gift of time that I (and all of us) inherited in 2020, I found myself with the ability to reflect and think about these questions. With what other types of art made by queer people would queer abstraction naturally form an alignment? Also, were there types of work made by queer people that had longstanding histories that could offer queer abstraction a halo of being easier to understand and experience?
Here are my answers to these questions:

Writings (theory, academic, history telling) by queer authors
Dance/movement pieces by queer choreographers and performers
Sound art and experimental music by queer composers

(I will note that in so much as queer abstraction is viewed as a new thing or an exhumation of a previous thing, there has been a constant understood history of writing, movement, and experimental music made by queer people.)

Part two of my artist notes follows AFTER the images of these paintings.