THE QUEER & NOW

"Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality… Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.”

– José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia

The 2021 Queer Spectra Arts Festival aims to explore the following questions.

• What is queer time?

• What is a queer space? 

• How do you experience or create a queer time and place?

• What potentialities does queer art have to offer? 

• How does queer art reimagine the future? 

• How does your art create and explore new worlds? 

• How does queer art interact with the past, present, and future? 

• What role does queer desire play in your art? 

SATURDAY MAY 22, 2021

• 9AM: Welcome to the 2021 Queer Spectra Arts Festival

• 11AM: Tales of Magiclandia Workshop with Tori Meyer and Nora Lang

• 3PM: Keynote Presentation by Timothy White Eagle

• 7PM: Virtual Slumber Party with the Artists! Pull up the popcorn and get ready to talk about a year of art-making from our bedrooms.

SUNDAY MAY 23, 2021

• 11AM: Body Curiosity: Movement workshop with Alexandra Barbier

• 3PM: Exploring Queer Futures Panel Discussion with the Artists

• 5PM: Live-Stream Performance by Indigo Cook followed by closing Remarks

Community Playlist

This year, Queer Spectra asked our community to share songs for our community playlist. Did you have a song that got you through the past year? What songs made you dream of queer futures and horizons imbued with potentiality? Maybe there was a song that made you see a future where this world is enough!

Check out our Queer Spectra 2021 Playlist!

SLUMBER PARTY!

Saturday, May 22 at 7pm (MDT)

Put on your PJs and pull up your popcorn for the first ever Queer Spectra Slumber Party. This artist-led panel discussion pays homage to a uniquely queer space that has become critical to art making during the pandemic: the bedroom.

QUEER FUTURES PANEL

Sunday, May 23 at 3pm (MDT)

Join festival artists for a discussion focused on the role of queer art to shape our futures. Art can envision new spaces and future for queer expression, identities, and exploration.

Andrés Juárez Troncoso

Andrés Juárez is a visual activist based in Mexico City. His work “Las Otras Impolutas” (The Spotless Others) has been selected Winner at the 2017 Latin America Fotografia at New York City, shortlisted at the 2017 Texas Biennial, and finalist at the 2016 Oaxaca Biennial, 12th Festival Internacional de Fotografia “Paraty em Foco”, 2016 Nexo Foto, and Transversalidades 2016 – Fotografía sem Fronteiras, and the 2015 El Paso-Juarez Biennial. His work have been exhibited in several individual and group exhibitions in United States, Brasil, Costa Rica, Spain, Portugal and Mexico. He is currently working on a project regarding body transformation of transgender males in Mexico.

Amanda Maraist

Amanda Maraist is a movement deviser, improviser and performer from the Texas Gulf Coast. She performs in Chicago with Khecari, and acts as an operations assistant for the company. She participates in several other collaborative processes with local musicians and artists, with her personal work imagining the body as a sloppy archive, and aims to incite coincidence. Through authentic movement practices and meticulously rendered improvisational scores she welcomes unwieldy processes and a DIY demeanor.

www.amandamaraist.com

Parviz Abdullayev

Hi ! My name is Parviz. I'm fashion designer and collage artist based in Baku.

Neil Farrell

Neil Farrell is a queer YouTuber, Comedian and Musician from Ireland. Shortly after coming out as non-binary and poly, they toured a one-person-show, Queersplaining, which was an evening of songs, stand-up and stories, all about the power of being your authentic self. Since then they have released music, played sellout shows and headlined queer comedy nights as well as the Dublin Fringe Festival.

During lockdown, Neil made the move to YouTube and started to produce video essays on philosophy and science communication, featuring delicious vegan recipes, under the name "The Liberal Cook". They are a freelance writer, editor and composer, and live their peaceful life in the West of Ireland, with their two partners and two daughters.

YouTube.com/NeilFarrellEntertainments

Rae Luebbert

Rae Luebbert is a multidisciplinary movement artist and arts administrator based in Salt Lake where she works in dance advocacy for Dance/USA, academic advising for the University of Utah, dance education, and art making. In 2019, Rae produced a show entitled "Rosie" surrounding the complexity of the color pink and its relation to gender, identity, and storytelling. Rae has presented and performed work with Dance Place (DC), Juanita Winston Dance (Maryland), the Hirshorn Smithsonian Museum (DC), and Sample Series (Salt Lake). Recently, Rae performed in “Hundred Years Hence” produced by Deseret Experimental Opera.

Nick Gochnour

Hi, my name's Nick. I'm currently finishing up a Masters at the Southern California Institute of Architecture....all online sadly. I've long been an onlooker on the art world but never felt the confidence to participate outside of school. Coming out several years ago has helped me develop the ability to just be me. I believe in the power of art to change our way of being in the world and to initiate changes in the cultural imagination.

Pierandrea Miglietta & Alexander Schaef

Alexander Schaef is a Porto-based installation/performance artist originally from New York. They strive to unearth and devour the intimate vulnerabilities of each art-viewer/audience by illuminating the many ways we manipulate and/then deconstruct the self in an effort to reclaim our own humanness. Using poetic slashes/scribbles/spit/garbage, they insinuate and transcend the intense emotions of a manic episode, concentrating on self-harm and forgiveness in a society (and mind) that’s ill at its core.

Pierandrea Miglietta is a Porto-based provocateur whose work straddles the sizzling, secretive tightrope between sex and sin. His works transfigure and subvert the heteronormative binary, going beyond the traditional politics of identification, embracing radical inclusion by affinity. This artistic duo aims to expand, explore and explode brand-new spheres of influence & abundance, creating spaces where empowered bodies can construct profound, unfamiliar modes of communication, ultimately wrestling with the grotesque and mendacious core of queerness.

Nóra Juhász

Nóra Juhász (Born: Budapest, Hungary, 1993) lives and works in Budapest. Studied Painting, Visual Arts and Set Design at Hungarian University of Fine Arts and at Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris. Her works explore the contradictions of contemporary life, contrasting the personal with the public and the banal with the sacred. Mainly creating paintings, her works have a visual world that playfully mixes grotesque elements of wide associations, that appears in her video and graphic works too.

www.juhasznora.com

Joey Anderson

Joey Anderson is from Salt Lake City, Utah and is currently a senior at BYU. He is working towards earning his Bachelor of Arts in Dance and he’s on his third season with BYU’s Contemporary Dance Theater (CDT). First under the direction of Nathan Balser and now Keely Song, Joey has worked with many artists such as Jesse Obremski, LAJAMARTIN, Francisco Gella, Jenn Freeman, Jen Pendleton. Joey wants to use dance to amplify queer voices and to promote not just acceptance, but nurturance for the community. He has felt the power that dance has firsthand to connect one another and he believes that there is no better means to accomplish this goal. Dance combines auditory, visual, and kinesthetic senses with stories yearning to be felt and understood. The vulnerability involved in taking up space and sharing one’s self is an invitation to everyone witnessing to be brave and join in.

http://jandersonoey.com/

Keziah Kenning

I am a 25-year-old queer artist in Salt Lake City. I've been an artist my entire life; drawing being my passion since I can remember. It's also served as an outlet for me. Lately, I've used many art forms like drawing, painting, writing and music to express the most difficult of emotions I've faced as someone battling many traumas and mental health issues throughout my life. Through my art, I want to provide a sense of catharsis for myself as well as provide others - especially queer people, who many of the issues I've faced uniquely affect - with a sense of understanding, healing, and inspiration. And of course, to create pieces that feel wholly visceral and unique.

Nataly

Nataly is a Filipino-American artist born in Cebu, Philippines and based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Primarily working with oil paint, Nataly creates contemporary imaginative realism informed by their experiences as a queer person of color. Nataly’s work explores femininity and queerness in a way that challenges perceptions of beauty while embracing strangeness.

https://natalyart.com/

Keith D. Buswell

Keith Buswell graduated with a BFA in art University of Nebraska--Lincoln. He works with various printmaking processes such as screen-printing, intaglio and mono printing and dabbles in drawing and multimedia. He currently is a member of Karen Kunc’s Constellation Studios where he creates his prints. His work has been shown in the United States, Egypt, Dubai, France and Italy. Notably, Keith received the Perry Family Award in 2018 and second place in the 40 Under 40 Showcase in Annapolis, MD and third place at the Under Pressure print show in Fort Collins, CO. He is a contributing artist to issue 23 and 28 of The Hand Magazine. He also attended residencies at The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center in Nebraska City, Nebraska and at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Hyattsville, Maryland. Originally from Council Bluffs, Iowa, he currently lives in Lincoln with his husband Brad and his dog Max.

https://www.keithdbuswell.art/qmart

Margot Apricot

I’m a Trans printmaker and designer from SLC. I make work that is fun and inviting but hides insidious or thought provoking ideas.

Instagram.com/margotapricot

Sage Bennett

Sage Bennett is a filmmaker and photographer. Sage is originally from Chicago, and since then has lived in SLC and LA. Sage’s work is evocative, nuanced, and taps into universal truths from a feminine perspective. Sage is passionate about using filmmaking as a tool to help us empathize with those we may not otherwise understand, and ultimately bring us together.

https://www.sagebennett.com/

Ash Wix

Ash is a nonbinary activist and artist. Their work centers around celebrating neurodiversity, breaking down binaries, and empowering community sufficiency.

Christoforos Botsis

Anglo-Greek visual artist. Studied Fine Art at the University of Reading in the UK and Monash University in Australia and Art Theory at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Has exhibited internationally in Greece, the UK, Armenia, Bulgaria and Italy. Works in a range of mediums, including painting, photography and large-scale installations.

www.christoforosbotsis.com

Nelson Morales

Since 2008 he has dedicated himself completely to photography independently and has studied various educational programs of contemporary photography in Mexico. His work focuses mainly on issues of gender, body, identity and sexual diversity. He has made various collective in 18 countries and he has obtained different mentions and recognitions around the world. His work has been published in Aperture, New York times, Vogue Italia, Vogue México, Vice, mexicanísimo, TETU, Loeil de la photograpie, The British Journal of photography, Der Greif and many more. In 2018 he published his first Photobook, “Musas Muxe” and in 2019 he published his second Photobook “Fantastic Woman”.

www.nelsonmorales.com.mx

Rosa Bandierinha

Rosa is a queer Portuguese architect who enjoys traveling and music. Rosa looks at art as a thought process in dialogue with space and time; a way to interpret oneself, others, and the world. Rosa likes to explore new ideas, and experience art in its many mediums.

Noah Mease

NOAH MEASE is a queer cartoonist, once & future theater artist, writer, and object-maker. he studies science, fiction, love, and magic through his art. based in NYC, he is the OBIE Award-winning prop designer of many plays and musicals on and off-Broadway, and he's developed and produced his own plays throughout the city with the support of many friends and institutions. always drawn to forms that juxtapose image and language, his recent work lingers at the crossroads of comic art and theater text. born and educated in Vermont, Noah now lives & works in the South Bronx.
www.noahmease.com

Hannah Liddell

Hannah is a Utah based sculpture student and installation artist whose work has appeared in the Woodbury Museum of Art. In her work she likes to explore the magic of place, and the tension and harmony of a life In-Between as a bisexual and as a religious queer. When she's not making art, she can be found collecting bones and talking too much about the plots of video games.

https://www.behance.net/hannaholivia

Deborah Alma Wheeler

Deborah Alma Wheeler has exhibited nationally and internationally and has had several pieces collected by museums including Tom of Finland’s TOM House located in West Hollywood California and The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction Gallery in Bloomington, Indiana. Along with exhibitions, Deborah has presented her work abroad, at the University of Oxford and the University College of Dublin in Ireland. Deborah received her Master of Fine Arts from Michigan State University specializing in sculpture and her Bachelor of Fine Arts also in sculpture and a minor in art history from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville as well as her Bachelor of Science with an emphasis on K-12 Art Education. Currently, Deborah lives and works in the St. Louis, Missouri metro area as a contracted artist/fabricator/instructor.

Nate Francis

Nate Francis is a photographic and sculptural artist who works with issues of identity and isolation. He often appears in his own work by documenting his body or performing for the camera. Nate grew up in Provo, Utah in an LDS family of nine children. His work explores the consequences of his upbringing in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as a gay youth, the challenge of creating a home after coming out, as well as the hope of finding a new and more suitable environment in the future.

natefrancis.com

Rosemary Carroll

Rosemary works at the intersection of lecture, dance and poetry. Rosemary aims to be a friend and lover to all creatures.

@love.rosemary.carroll

Daria Garina

Daria is a neurodiverse, transgender refugee of Russian and Chinese-Kazakhstani descent. He arrived on Ohlone Land (SF Bay) at 6 yrs old and has never left. His film vignettes are largely autobiographical, demanding justice and searching for connection through a fragmented past. At Accountability Mapping, Daria teaches Transformative Justice skills through the body, helping people align their actions with what deeply matters to them. The practice came to him in a dream. In 2018, Daria co-founded The QTBIPOC Hive with randy reyes to ignite a thriving ecosystem of queer, trans, Black, Indigneous, and poc performing artists on Ohlone land (SF Bay). Daria's currently honing his clairvoyant mediumship skills through study of the I-Ching, Qi Gong and Chinese BaZi astrology.

www.dariagarina.com, www.accountabilitymapping.com

Clayton Conley

I think my poems will do a better job than this blurb at giving you a little peek into my life, but here are a few phrases I’d use to describe myself:

1. Aspiring real boy who takes himself about as seriously as you should

2. Lover of words and numbers

3. Withers without attention

4. I suppose it’s now redundant to say given the last line: gay.

https://claytonconleypoetry.wordpress.com/

Guinness Waller

Guinness Waller is a trans lesbian experimental animator and filmmaker currently dwelling in a nightmarish suburbia outside Los Angeles. Her work has been concerned with and critical of representation, visibility, assimilation, legitimacy, productivity, futurity, ecological collapse, and cybernetics. She also spends a lot of time thinking about spiders, ghosts, large bodies of water, fungus, and dance parties. She is interested in imagining another world or another end of the world and finding ways to live out aspects of these imaginations in the here and now. Guinness is currently finishing an undergraduate degree at California Institute of the Arts where she is working on a thesis film about insurrectionary gay zombies.

https://vimeo.com/guinnesswaller

Katelyn Handy

Katelyn Handy is a 19 year old singer/songwriter born and raised in Utah. Katelyn grew up in a house filled with music, her mom being a vocal teacher and performer. Part of Katelyn’s inspiration comes from the struggles of being a lesbian in a conservative state. Her new single, “Straight Girl” addresses the agony of crushing on someone that you know will never like you back. Katelyn strives to create art that she wishes she could have seen growing up as part of the community.

Cameron Chiovitti

My name is Cameron Chiovitti, and I am a twenty two year old nonbinary Canadian. I grew up in Montreal, Quebec, but moved to Toronto, Ontario, almost three years ago. I have been writing since the age of eight, but I found my true passion, poetry, at the age of sixteen. I attend OCAD University for Creative Writing. Since moving to Toronto, I have started slamming with the Toronto Poetry Slam, Hamilton Youth Slam, and ranked sixth at the 2020 Voices Of Today Festival. In April 2018 I self-published a poetry book called “Your Mountain’s Crown,” and in January 2020 I published a chapbook called “When People Ask About The Breakup” on She’s Got Wonder. My poem “Drunken Ramblings of a Broken Heart” has been exhibited in mcsway poetry collective’s third edition of the Heartbreak Museum as of February 12th, 2021, and my poem “Lasalle Boulevard” has been published in LSTW’s fifth issue.

Mara Lemesany & Hanna Walter

Mara takes pictures sometimes, and Hanna takes pictures more often. They are both from outside of Utah but have been here a helluva long time.

Billy Clouse

Raised in the heat of the Las Vegas Valley, I fell in love with graphic design and began exploring personal identity amongst the red rocks of Utah. I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Graphic Design from Southern Utah University, where I served as the Editor-in-Chief of two news programs, designed for three academic conferences and journals, and represented the College of Performing and Visual Arts in student government. Areas of interest include Queer identity and equality, feminism, and intactivism.

http://www.billyclouse.com/

Nathalie Christmas

Upon graduating in 2011 with a BA in Visual Arts, Nathalie Christmas garnered praise from Slamdance Film Festival, Dazed and Confused, and Nowness for writing and directing coming-of-age films “Rose and Sophia,” and “Seashells.” Born and raised in a farm-town alongside five sisters, much of their work centers around a fantasized femme perspective. Informed by autobiography, their stories take on new life through paradox and exploration of genre. Christmas currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Photo by Hana Haley. http://nathaliechristmas.com

Danny Jarratt

Danny Jarratt (b. 1990 Kaurna Land, Adelaide) is an emerging queer digital artist exploring installation art. His work reflects a keen interest in the intersection of pop culture, queer theory and resistance. His installations function as micro utopias and queer counterpublics which allow people to escape the imposing day to day ideologies and expectations, with fun and convenient methods, such as videogame design. He graduated at the University of South Australia with Bachelor of Art & Design (Honours) and currently is undertaking a residency at George Street Studios.

Jarratt’s emerging practice has exhibited locally at FELTspace, MOD., Praxis Artspace, Fontanelle Gallery and The Adelaide Festival Theatre. He recently undertook his first interstate solo exhibition Neo Glitch City at Seventh Gallery and has international features in group exhibitions at MOM-us Experimental Center for the Arts in Greece, Dovetail Gallery in North England and was a finalist in the STARVD art prize in Singapore.

http://www.dannyjarratt.com

Indigo Cook

Indigo Cook is a percussionist, dancer, and interdisciplinary maker-of-things. She graduated from Westminster College with a degree in percussion performance, where she studied with Dr. Devin Maxwell. As a freelance artist based out of Salt Lake, she teaches and performs with various local groups in addition to managing individual and community-based creative projects. Indigo is the founder/facilitator of Interdisciplinary Arts Collective, a multi-disciplinary performance group through which she loves collaborating with other artists, non-artists, and anti-artists. She is the cofounder of Salty Showcase, a digital performance platform that curates and presents work by local artists, and she also serves on the planning board for ARC: Art for the Recovery Community, an annual art festival based in Salt Lake City., She relishes any opportunity she can get to make strange things, listen deeply, and connect with her community through the power of art.

interdisciplinaryartscollective.com

Zac Thorn

Zac Thorn is an actor currently studying in his sophomore year at the University of Utah with the actor training program. Zac has a passion for proper representation and portrayal of queer stories. Zac loves to perform however due to virtually all theatre being canceled due to the pandemic he has decided to channel his efforts into creating his own work, telling his story of growing up queer and mormon and essentially two people at once.

Jakub Kostewicz

Bad bitch wannabe, upcoming queer superstar, definitely not a make-up artist, and a temporary student of animated film. His main artistic ambition is to be chaotic and don't focus at any topic nor medium for too long. Jakub spent the first year of the pandemic on getting to know local drag artists and protesting against Polish government.

https://www.behance.net/jkostewicz

Aubane Berthommé Martinez

Aubane Berthommé Martinez is a Rotterdam based multidisciplinary artist, curator, and a million of other things. Originating from the south of France, she moved to the north of France to start her studies, then flew to Montreal to evolve in a more militant artistic environment. Finally, she settled in Rotterdam where she enjoys confronting her Latin Mediterranean background to the Dutch but mainly multinational cultural scene. She has an unreasonable taste for kitsch and ugly visuals, is a complete work addict (but knows how to take a break), and has a passion for making and exhibiting politically related art.

In 2020 she created Squish, a queer platform and collective organizing cultural events. Via Squish, she organizes podcasts, exhibitions, workshops, and parties, all related to LGBTQIA+ identities.

https://www.aubanebm.com/

Arin Lynn

I am a hoosier and a dance and multimedia artist currently based in Salt Lake City, UT. During my time here, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many wonderful people who I admire so much. Some of those people include Nora Lang, Daniel Clifton, Anna Azrieli, and Nick Weaver. Right now, I feel that I’ve arrived at a fork in the road in both my queer identity and my artistic identity. And to be completely honest with you, I am terrified of making a choice. So for here and now, that leaves me exploring ideas of building a middle path. In other news I have found that I love pet sitting and reading fantasy novels.

Khairullah Rahim

Khairullah Rahim (he/him) is a multi-media artist working across objects, installations and images. Through critical thinking centered around the politics of demeanor and the crossroads between conspicuity, legibility and safety, his practice considers the veiled narratives of those whose identities may not align with social norms. Khairullah has presented his works internationally as well as actively participated in artist residency programs, namely Salzburger Kunstverein, Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, Facebook, Taipei Artist Village and YOUKOBO. His works are in the collection of Singapore Art Museum and SUNPRIDE Foundation. Currently, he is an MFA Visual Arts candidate at Rutgers University, New Jersey.

www.khairullahrahim.com

Alise Anderson

Alise Anderson was born in Houston, Texas. She received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2020, with a focus on video, performance, and sculpture. She has exhibited in group shows and a solo show around the Bay Area since 2017. She has participated in residencies at CalArts, San Jose museum of Textiles, and has a forthcoming residency with Recology and Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. Anderson currently lives and works in Bountiful, UT.

www.aliseanderson.com

Josh Orme

Reader. Dreamer. Poet.