I’LL TAKE YOU THERE
Gary Cruz
The Olympia Project
255 McKibbin Lofts
January 10 - March 10, 2020
Opening Reception: January 10, 2020, 6-9pm
Curated by Marian Casey
Texan-born, New York-based artist Gary Cruz explores the potential for almost painterly abstraction in iPhone shot and edited works, creating compelling portraits of queer space across 30 banners playfully ensconced in aluminum-clad walls. I’ll Take You There documents the interiors of gay bars he’s visited across the country and the world, reflecting on queer sites, aesthetic, community, and history.
I’ll Take You There pairs the spontaneity of bar photos taken on an iPhone with Cruz’s consuming and ruminative process of digitally pushing, pulling, stretching and pinching images via a range of techniques and technologies. Cruz’s career in architecture and interior design informs his eye for capturing the lives and emotions of bar interiors. His unique editing process collapses and experiments on space, expanding the images away from the interiors themselves, threading a fine line of pushing into purely formal instincts while maintaining the mood and spirit of the source material.
I’ll Take You There is the second installment in the curatorial project HotHouse. Inspired by one regional queer history in Houston and in acknowledgement of the many queer histories yet to be shared, HotHouse is an ongoing curatorial project exploring current queer creators' relationships to queer history, space, aesthetics, and memory. How do we relate to the precarity, politics, and potential for comfort and joy of intentional queer spaces? What is our role in remembering and recording those spaces once they’re gone, and what might we owe to the particular queer histories of the spaces we occupy? HotHouse ’s inaugural exhibition featured video artist Kameron Neal at Detroit Art Week’s Young Curators, New Ideas V, July 2019.
Gary Cruz
@garycruzstudio | garycruzstudio.com
Gary Cruz (b. 1961) earned a degree in architecture from University of Texas, Austin, TX, and attended Bronx Museum of the Arts, AIM Program, Bronx, NY. The artist is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant and Robert Rauschenberg Change Inc. Grant. His first solo show was at White Columns in 2003, and he has also exhibited at The Drawing Center, Art in General, and the Islip Art Museum. A native of Rockport, Texas, he now lives and works in New York City.
Marian Casey
@maz_kc | mariancasey.com
An independent curator and art historian, Marian’s curatorial practice focuses on social engagement and building experimental approaches to historic narratives and spaces. She is especially driven to curate projects promoting women and LGBT+ artists and stories. Marian co-founded SXRVXVE, an interdisciplinary curatorial platform dedicated to creating and presenting projects and artists engaging with systems of power. SXRVXVE has since curated four projects across the U.S. and the U.K., working with over 90 artists from across the globe. Marian has worked with curatorial teams at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Courtauld Gallery, The Royal Academy, and Times Square Arts, among others.
The Olympia Project
@the.olympia.project | olympia-project.com
Founded by independent curator Sophie Olympia Riese, The Olympia Project is a platform for unrepresented emerging contemporary art, focusing on socially-engaged practices to create alternative cultural discourse and progressive exchanges between diverse artists and audiences, with a goal of broadening audiences and increasing access to and within the art world, providing opportunities to artists who are early career or emerging, typically from underrepresented or marginalized groups
