Dimensions variable, 2014. Mixed media.
I began my own museum because I started looking at queer sections of museums or queer museums, such as the Pop-up Museum of Queer History in New York City, but I really didn't find these objects queer... but why not? In terms of the displayed objects: some were given to me, some were purchased, while some were made by me, which is reflected in the labeling.
I wanted to show the museum phenomenologically because I feel like that's the way it has to function. I have been thinking about moving these objects in a gallery setting but the items would lose their relationship to each other and their surroundings. I am not necessarily interested in institutional critique, but I am questioning the role of a museum as a private space and also positing what a museum of queer artifacts would look like.
Perhaps if I had a personal thus physical relationship with the object would it determine its queerness or are they inherently queer? Using my room as a gallery or museum I made certain items from my past and present visible and in the process finding a place where these objects belong.
In order to make a queer space more visible I vacuumed the carpet and put it on a pedestal. What revealed itself was four months of lint, carpet, cat litter, cat hair, skin cells, human hair, dirt or what I call "queer lint."
Many of these objects are just weird such as: a burnt dollhead, a doll with a moustachel, a singing doll, and a holographic Mary but are these objects queer because they are just weird or is my relationship to them queer?
My sometime collaborator and I made a lot of these silly drawings 8 years ago that we tried to hang up in a gallery but no one would show them, so in a way these drawings finally found a home.