CELEBRATING THE NEW QUEER ICONS WHO HAVE CAPTURED THE NATIONAL CONVERSATION

“Well hello. Let’s celebrate that.”

-Oprah

Artist Statement:

In a continuation of my use of portraiture to engage with the ways celebrity, notoriety, and “cringe” serve as primary shapers of popular culture, I now focus on a particular flashpoint of the contemporary “culture wars” that seems to provoke millenarian passions on all fronts: the ever-evolving question of LGBTQ representation.

In attending to the subject matter of “Queer villains,” I seek to engage with the internal contradictions of Queer identity and culture that provoke general obsession, above all the tension between the triumphantly righteous tone of contemporary identitarianism and the longstanding tradition of irony, extravagance, and artifice at the heart of traditional Queer art forms, where a certain joy and power is found in both the villainous and the vaudevillian.

In having achieved a hitherto unprecedented degree of visibility and influence, the LGBTQ movement may appear variously as an insidious threat to sacred traditions, a powerful force for overturning repressive norms, or—if one can look past all the hysterics—its own incidental Drag spectacle that naturally lends itself to the production of larger-than-life characters. For appreciators of “camp” as a cultural form, these archetypes inspire a form of ironic admiration beyond mere condemnation or embarrassment. It is this spirit of camp I aim to capture in my paintings.

Inquiries: viviana@thnk1994.com