One more kiss then we're history
Cobi Moules, Kelli Connell, Molly Landreth, Steven Frost, and Steve Locke
December 1 to 17, 2011

Link to images from the exhibition

This exhibition brings together the work of several artists who deal with gender identity, persona, and sexual orientation as conceptual frameworks for their art-making. Each of the artists approach the subject from different mediums, intensities, and points of view. 

Cobi Moules’ paintings explore his transition from female to male. He regularly paints self portraits in which he navigates his complex individual experience through the subtle re-imagining of his physicality and the creation of fantasy worlds. “My work is a response to a physical, emotional and psychological self that is continually changing. For example, there are moments of fear of the unknown and unwanted possibilities as well and pure joy and excitement of those same possibilities. I am driven to express all of those experiences, good and bad, and my approach is based primarily on my state of mind while creating a piece.” Cobi received his MFA in 2010 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. His work has been exhibited in Boston, New York, Oberlin, OH, and Ogunquit, ME. He lives and works in Boston.

Kelli Connell’s portraits appear to document a relationship between two women. Their idiom looks familiar: a young couple caught up in everyday moments of pleasure and reflection. The first flicker of unease comes as soon as the viewer registers the similarity of the two subjects, who seem to be twins—and perhaps incestuous twins at that. In fact, Connell has photographed the same model portraying both of the women and then digitally combined the two images so seamlessly that not a trace remains of their construction. The photographs in her series and in her recently published book, Double Life, extend far beyond their duplicity into larger and more complex issues of identity and visual rhetoric. “For the most part, I’m not actually thinking so much about representing two females in a relationship. I’m more so thinking about the multiple sides of the self in the overall human experience.” Kelli received an MFA from Texas Woman’s University. Her body of work, Double Life, has been included in numerous national solo and group exhibitions. Connell’s work is included in the collections of Microsoft; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Columbus Museum of Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Kelli teaches at Columbia College Chicago.

Molly Landreth is a documentary and portrait photographer who has spent more than five years traveling around the country photographing gay and transgendered people for her on-going project, Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life in America. Her work doesn’t shy away from portraying the loneliness and isolation that many young people feel as they struggle with coming out. “There is a lot of sadness that goes along with figuring out who you are, and there is such a risk often times in being out. Acknowledging the hard times is really important.” But equally important are her portraits of individuals and couples that are at ease with themselves in the world. “There’s a lot of strength showing marginalized communities being really strong and tender with each other. Instead of hyper-sexualized images, I like the images to be about strength and honesty, taking out the bashfulness and shame.”  Molly holds an MFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY. She was named one of The Humble Art Foundations, “Top 31 Women Art Photographers Under 31,” featured as one of Jen Bekman’s “Hot Shots” and was featured in Magenta Publishing’s “Flash Forward” Exhibition as new Emerging Talent.  She recently had a solo show at The Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO. She lives in Seattle.

Steve Locke is a figurative painter: “From the very beginning, I was trying to be a portrait painter. I wasn’t interested in any of the other things…. It was the appeal of the body, because you can do things with other people’s bodies that you can’t do with your own. It’s one of the best things about painting the [human] figure…. I make work that explores relationships between and among men. The exchange of looks, the privilege of looking and the wish to be seen are positions I explore to reveal the ways men respond, desire, and relate to each other…. A lot of people look at [my] paintings and think that they’re about being gay or about being queer and I try to remind them that they’re about being male, and that’s a different sort of thing. I’m not opposed to being queer, I hope to be really good at it one day, but I think the notion that two men can be together in a situation or they can be touching and they might not be gay, they might just be two men—I think that that happens. I don’t think that’s a gay thing, that’s just a male thing.” Steve holds an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, where he currently teaches in the art education and MFA programs, and he attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has been nominated for numerous awards including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston Artist Prize. His work has been exhibited in Boston, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Bejing, China, Basel, Switzerland.

Steven Frost is fascinated by the spectacle and the often extreme masculinity exhibited in professional wrestling, particularly as played out in Mexican Lucha Libre culture. His fiber-based objects hint at the tension between masculinity and queerness through the use of everyday materials combined in visually surprising ways. In this exhibition, his painted, sewn, and transformed hand towels “address the perceived wrongness of my love of sweat, tears, and cum. They merge somewhere between: a cum rag crumbled under the bed; the athlete wiping himself during a bout; a towel used by Vegas-era Elvis then sold on eBay. This wrong-love translates into my assertion that fringe, sequins, gold, metal studs and floral motifs are not cheap or tasteless, but have a value given to them by their audience.” The titles of the works are drawn from various writings by Jean Genet. “Genet’s penchant for rough trade and lack of shame in expressing this "wrongness" moves through a lot of my work. In particular a quote from the Miracle of the Rose, ‘…beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.'”  Steven has an MFA in fiber arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. His work has been exhibited in Washington, DC, Chicago, San Francisco, and most recently at the Helen Day Art Center in Stow, VT. He currently lives in Chicago.

Image: Kelli Connell, The Valley, digital color photograph, 2006, 30 x 40 inches, edition of 6. (Courtesy the Photo Center NW Collection.)