Pansy Twist: An Incomplete Survey/Mixtape of American Riot Boi Art
Featuring: Seth Bogart + Jeffrey Cheung + Brontez Purnell
Show runs October 25, 2019 – January 4, 2020
Reception: Friday, January 3, 5-8pm
Pansy Twist: An Incomplete Survey/Mixtape of American Riot Boi Art is a decidedly un-essential collective convo instigated by Seth Bogart, Jeffrey Cheung, and Brontez Purnell; all three art makers representing both successive and simultaneous waves of Post-Punk, Post Riot Grrrl, Post-Queercore, Post-Pop, and Post Post Post Post Post Post Post Modern Art movements.
All starting as musicians in the fertile and majestic Bay Area queer scene – this art show positions itself as an unwilling movement that is set to explore questions of (but not limited to): the impact of the feminist gaze in queer male art, the inextricable link between music and visual art, the recalibration and transmogrification of d.i.y. (do it yourself) reality into d.i.t. (DO IT TOGETHER) reality, the simultaneous exalting, examination, and (hopeful) annihilation of what constitutes the “boy genius”, scene pageantry, and the inherent superiority of queer alternative art. The night will include ceramics, paintings, film install, a filmed happening, convo, and marijuana smoking outside.
Seth Bogart is an artist and musician living in Los Angeles, CA. He works in painting, video, sculpture and performance and makes music under his own name or Hunx and His Punx. He has exhibited work and performed at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Participant INC, Artist Curated Projects, One Archives, MoCA, Nino Mier Gallery, 356 S Mission, Fierman, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and others.
Jeffrey Cheung is a Bay Area based artist, who is the co-founder of Unity Press and Unity Skateboarding. Cheung’s bright figurative work celebrates queerness within his personal life and within skate culture. He is a prolific maker, whose vivacious art examines freedom, identity, and intersectionality, through bold color and intertwined characters. Cheung’s figures stem from his queer zine making practice and have grown into larger than life paintings. His genderless body positive world questions the boundaries of sexuality, body, gender, and race. Cheung’s simplistic line-work of gender nonspecific bodies offers a clever yet loving response to the heteronormative gaze creating a more inclusive and accessible entry point.
Brontez Purnell, whose “explorations of blackness, queerness, maleness, and Southernness take sharp, confident turns between raunch and rhapsody,” has been publishing, performing, and curating in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than ten years. He is the author of the cult zine Fag School, frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, and the founder and choreographer of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. He is the author of “The Cruising Diaries”, “Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger”, and “Since I Laid My Burden Down” and a children’s book “The Night Life of Jacuzzi Gaskett”. This is his first visual art show.
Seth Bogart is an artist and musician living in Los Angeles, CA. He works in painting, video, sculpture and performance and makes music under his own name or Hunx and His Punx. He has exhibited work and performed at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Participant INC, Artist Curated Projects, One Archives, MoCA, Nino Mier Gallery, 356 S Mission, Fierman, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and others.
Jeffrey Cheung is a Bay Area based artist, who is the co-founder of Unity Press and Unity Skateboarding. Cheung’s bright figurative work celebrates queerness within his personal life and within skate culture. He is a prolific maker, whose vivacious art examines freedom, identity, and intersectionality, through bold color and intertwined characters. Cheung’s figures stem from his queer zine making practice and have grown into larger than life paintings. His genderless body positive world questions the boundaries of sexuality, body, gender, and race. Cheung’s simplistic line-work of gender nonspecific bodies offers a clever yet loving response to the heteronormative gaze creating a more inclusive and accessible entry point.
Brontez Purnell, whose “explorations of blackness, queerness, maleness, and Southernness take sharp, confident turns between raunch and rhapsody,” has been publishing, performing, and curating in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than ten years. He is the author of the cult zine Fag School, frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, and the founder and choreographer of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. He is the author of “The Cruising Diaries”, “Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger”, and “Since I Laid My Burden Down” and a children’s book “The Night Life of Jacuzzi Gaskett”. This is his first visual art show.
BOGART PRESS LINKS
Cheung Press Links
Purnell Press Links
KQED: “‘Pansy Twist’ Celebrates the Possibilities of Community for Queer Rockers + Artists” “At Johansson Projects, the exhibition version of Pansy Twist offers its own compelling call to action in its offer of D.I.T., or “do it together” (compared to D.I.Y.’s plea to “do it yourself”)—a celebration of the possibilities of community. As Purnell puts it: “We hope somebody sees it and has a Pansy Twist in their town.” by Ruth Gebreyesus Link
