The endless courage of trans and queer people to be seen and heard in this screwed up and increasingly fascist chapter of our shared history is nothing short of miraculous. “Make Me Feel Mighty Real: Drag/Tech and the Queer Avatar”, a group exhibition at Honor Fraser, should be understood as an altar erected in homage to this miracle – a jewel-encrusted blasphemous kiss planted on the stiletto heel of the Divine .
Posing drag as a primary technology in the construction of social and lived worlds, the exhibition’s co-curators – gallery director Jamison Edgar and New York-based artist and DJ Scott Ewalt – drew inspiration from decades of performers and drag performances, promoting a very– out-of-the-ordinary gay aesthetic. In this embrace of excess, Edgar and Ewalt used virtually every square inch of space. A reception desk in the back of Honor Fraser, for example, became a narrow projection surface for the video room of HOUSE OF AVALON CYBER EXCERPTS #501, 2023, while a longer wall directly opposite another (but still functional) reception desk at the front of the gallery featured a handful of materials from the Greer Lankton Archive at the Pittsburgh Mattress Factory. Visual polyphony was favored over spatial balance, and sometimes, as with Lankton’s installation, this was not to the artist’s advantage. Still, overall the risk was worth it, as there were times when the general anarchy was gleefully taken up in individual pieces, such as the shimmering accumulative sculpture series “Shroud”, 2021–, by Max Colby, and the Visionary Avatars Inhabiting Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley Web Project BLACKTRANSARCHIVE.COM2021.
A sense of political urgency grounded in the ever-changing linguistic and representational orders that bring together and punctuate diverse gender experiences that run through the exhibition. These aspects were not presented as eccentric moments in history, but as key technologies needed to destroy and expand any calcified hegemonic notion of sex. Viewed in this way, drag artists should be understood as some of the most brilliant genre engineers of our time. Long display cases in the first room of the exhibition, filled with objects from Ewalt’s personal collection of cultural ephemera produced between the 1950s and the early 2000s, beautifully underscored this point. The selection offered here admitted that the key distinctions between “trans” and “drag” presentations and experiences have not always been so clearly delineated. Early examples of this phenomenon include Maestro Irving Klaw’s “transploitation” publications (e.g., Female facial expressions1954), Leonard Burtman’s fetish rags (as « Maid to please,” 1958), and a handful of brilliant eight-by-ten glamor from old-school queens such as Kim August, Dorian and Kitt Russell. Other cases featured material from a newer, more punk, New York-centric vintage: Wigstock posters (created by Ewalt), event flyers, a copy of Candy Darling’s pink vinyl-covered diaries released in 1997 and LPs from Joey Arias, Jayne Comté, Divine and Sylvestre.
“Make Me Feel Mighty Real” was not flawless, perhaps a necessary shortcoming of his ambition. Most notable was the fact that male-leaning forms of drag were largely (but not entirely) absent and thus denied the benefit of the show’s generative energy. This viewer was sad not to see examples of the changing photographic practice of Del LaGrace Volcano, the high-energy MC of Carmelita Tropicana’s alter ego, Pingalito Betancourt, the true heart of swagger that is Dred, the many broken kings by Catherine Opie, Marga Gomez’s myriad butch characters. , and Gotham’s Murray Hill, the self-proclaimed “hardest-working middle-aged man in show business.”
Making room for some of these innovators would have been in line with the show’s stated goals, expanding the language around drag elasticity as a technology. As this offering articulates, via its shrewd timing and embrace of voracious visual enjoyment, there is a continued need to draw connections between drag practices and trans incarnations, especially as current legislative initiatives seek queens and trans people, whether children or adults. , calling all gender nonconformists “unnaturals” and “outcasts.” It is in coming together that one will find resilience in the face of these disastrous circumstances, which would imply, in a way, taking on the imaginative task at the heart of the exhibition.
