“Blue Like Fortune” is an exhibition of works by Jenna Houston BHA ’18, Kasem Kydd BFA ’18, and Gray Swartzel MFA ’18 curated by Reese McArdle. Through a mix of contemporary mediums including video, sculpture, photography, and installation, the artists have turned the Bunker Projects gallery – already once transformed from domestic space to art space – into a space for imaging possible futures. The work queers past and present in an investigation of our collective preoccupation with binary structures and symbolic roles.
Houston creates work that queers domestic space and investigates narratives between chronic illness and gender
Kydd explores the tangible and metaphoric role of the ocean as an instrument in the slave trade as well as water’s capacity for cleansing and transformation
Swartzel considers symbolic roles like that of mother/son or masculine/feminine through the lens of Lacan, positing a preoccupation with theses symbolic roles as an obscuring of Lacan’s object petit a, or the object cause of desire
In these combined works we are left to ask: Is it our roles, our position in systems and histories, that give us meaning? And if so, can new meaning be discovered in a project of challenging this particular symbolic order?
“Blue Like Fortune” is on view at Bunker Projects in Pittsburgh from May 4 to 27. There is an opening reception on May 4 from 7-10pm and an artist talk on May 6 at 2pm.