April 30, 2015 3:30 pm in the Mezzanine Gallery
In “Moving Brown Grit: Unsettling Landscapes, Queering Enclosure,” Sandra K. Soto follows the lead of art historian John-Michael Warner to think critically and queerly about ways of seeing, rendering, collecting, purchasing, curating, inhabiting, desiring, and disrupting landscapes. Reading several of the “landscape” artworks brilliantly selected by Warner from the permanent collection of the University of Arizona Museum of Art for his exhibit, Changing Views: Queering U.S. Landscapes, Soto pauses over the de-familiarizing and de-mastering pleasures invited by his unlikely assemblage of artworks. Habitual ways of seeing become undone. Our own embodied movement through museum space gets re-routed. In particular, “Moving Brown Grit” is an effort to loosely explore one of Warner’s queer provocations: “What if the wilderness is not configured as pristine and virginal nor sowed and reaped? What if it is dirty, messy, and will not be mastered?”
Sandra K. Soto is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona and Editor of Feminist Formations. She is the author of Reading Chican@ Like a Queer: The De-Mastery of Desire. She writes, thinks, and teaches about queer things, brown things, and Arizona-challenging-things–usually all at once.
The lecture is free with Museum admission.
