Brian Britigan
Adrain Chesser
Steven Miller
Jeffry Mitchell

Beyond the Western Lands

September 05 – 29, 2012
Reception / Thursday, September 06, 6–9pm

José Esteban Muñoz, in Cruising Utopia, writes "Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world."

The queer artists in Beyond the Western Lands reimagine the intersection of man, nature and mythology in the fictive "West," typically characterized as a place of wilderness outside the constraints of law and civilization. The title also references the name ancient Egyptians had for where the dead reside.

Brian Britigan's paintings and drawings use animals as an abstracted view of human identity. The work uses the West as a starting point for an exploration of the tension between domestic and wild.

Adrain Chesser and Timothy White Eagle use ancient archetypes to create new mythologies. The rituals they create invoke images of sex, death, sacrifice, healing and rebirth, and reinvent stories like the Sacred Hunt and Thanatos & Eros.

Steven Miller's Wild Boys exist in an alternate universe that, while actively hostile, is a place where queers have agency. The tribalism, rituals, and anachronistic imagery throughout the work have their basis in texts by William S. Burroughs, Jean Genet, and Hakim Bey.

Jeffry Mitchell presents all new ceramic sculptures for this show. Here, he creates images of sex, death and transcendence, and abstracted notions of bones.