The Unruly Dance of Form
March 13 - May 10, 2025
The show explores hybrid storytelling methods—blending personal narratives, speculative fiction, and poetic reinterpretations—to expand how marginalized perspectives reimagine the intersections of queerness and architecture in profound and evocative ways. By merging lived experiences with speculative futures, these approaches construct multidimensional narratives that challenge normative frameworks. Through embodied storytelling and imaginative reconfigurations of familiar forms, spaces, and images—as well as through body modification and totemization—they reveal how queer individuals reshape the built world, envisioning spaces of inclusion, fluidity, and resistance.
The ‘architectural approach’ of the artists presented in the show refers to finding ways to represent the body (or its absence) through familiar—mostly domestic—objects. It manifests in a table leg, a barricade of chairs adorned with traces of human existence, such as chewed gum stains, a window bar suspended from a ‘queer abstract’ structure with obvious Catholic references, or a crucifix held by members of the Spanish Legion. This approach extends through performance and dance, where movements—whether precisely staged or completely improvised—create a sense of a much larger presence: a sculpture, a totem, an object of devotion. The artists’ works convey a distinctly architectural sensibility as they explore and construct their identities, shaping themselves into unique creatures from an outer world. Their individuality emerges through various body modifications and physical and digital ‘mutations.’
Andrius Alvarez-Backus works across sculpture and painting to explore the kinship between subjecthood and objecthood, particularly within the queer Filipinx experience. He crossbreeds disparate materials to examine how intimacy bridges beauty and abjection and how bodies are made and unmade through ornament and “thingness." By expressing a queer sense of embodiment without relying on conventional representational tactics, the artist challenges the ways in which memory, metaphor, and identity are fetishistically bound to material culture. For instance, Warming Into My Entry Wounds (2025) draws formal inspiration from Catholic devotional paintings. Suspender-like straps weave between swaths of flesh-colored textiles, forming an ambiguous landscape of eyes, open wounds, pockets, glory holes, and bodily orifices. A reclaimed iron window bar serves as a structural and symbolic anchor, staging the composition’s exploration of embodiment within a domestic space.
Cameron Patricia Downey’s sculpture Bass (2024) stems from a body of work created using materials gathered in the closing weeks of a Connecticut department store. The artist is interested in the 'private lives' of objects, spending time with them to investigate, gather, augment, and transform them—such that their form evokes inherent rhythms, intimate wishes, and an innate mysticism, shaped by witnessing many lives. Working with found objects, especially those that function as extensions of the human body, allows Downey to engage with time collapsed into things while simultaneously confronting an eco-social responsibility to see and repurpose the objects that overpopulate the world. Gathering these items into a communal display reveals something about their character, desires, interior lives, and ulterior motives.
With a background in genetic bioengineering and philology, Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov works with themes of queerness, human ecology, and body metamorphosis. In his video works, he employs choreography based on the movements of insects, mollusks, and reptiles to blur the perceptible boundary between the Human and the Animal. Similarly, in his sculptures, he dismantles social constructs that obstruct self-identification outside normative frameworks.
A cast concrete table leg, rubbed in graphite and leaning against a wall, is the work of Gordon Hall. The artist explains: “Sculpturally, I am particularly interested in furniture because furniture and furniture-like objects always request or conjure bodies, even when none are present. A chair asks for a butt, a handle for a hand, a step for a foot. My objects make these requests while also complicating our ability to definitively read them. I try to make objects that are this and this and this—refusing to fully arrive at any single identity, both recognizable and strange, just as my own body pushes up against normative categories of gendered personhood. My objects are sometimes my proxies and sometimes my companions—either way, making them is, for me, a method of imagining bodies differently.”
Jesús Hilario-Reyes’s practice operates at the crossroads of sonic performance, land installation, and expanded cinema, where he largely explores the impossibility of the Black body, the failure of mechanical optics, and the reverb of cultural dissonance. Through the examination of queer rave culture and carnival practices, the artist’s work takes on a necessary satirical approach to undermine dominant systems. In Vagabond Root (2024), he uses an animistic body to explore adaptation to specific environments and movement—a mutation of devil and goat as symbols of a particular sexuality and othered existence. It carries the weight of its past yet still moves, limping, half-dead, or exorcising outward. One leg is fueled by the decay of its shadow. Hilario-Reyes is interested in the apotropaic nature of carnival and queer nightlife: the notion that appearing mischievous or even evil can serve the function of warding off negative spirits and leveling space.
The video On a Pedestal (2018) by Oliver Herring explores the possibilities and limitations of a male body dressed in a white shirt, black shorts, and socks while standing atop a white pedestal. The juxtaposition of body and pedestal evokes archetypal relationships within the history of figurative sculpture. The last-minute addition of food-dyed water introduces an element of unpredictability, physically impacting the dancer’s rehearsed movements and forcing real-time adaptation. The artist, operating the camera, responds dynamically to the movement, framing Joshua within another rectangular shape. While the performance might be misread as a solo, it is, in this version, a duet. The video is accompanied by a drawing depicting the dancer from the film. In 2017, Herring encountered life drawings by British artist Keith Vaughan, a closeted gay man who committed suicide in 1979. Vaughan’s private diaries expressed loneliness but rarely desire, whereas his life drawings—kept private—are direct and filled with open longing, free from self-censorship. Inspired by Vaughan’s work, Herring began a series of life drawings exploring sexuality, gender, and identity. The drawings are of volunteers found mostly online, usually on Craigslist. Many of the sitters have returned for multiple sessions to build narratives over time that capture aspects of their personalities, bodies, life-events, and even sexualities. Each person has different reasons for participating. Some participants feel unseen and almost invisible in this world. Others say they rarely allow themselves to be vulnerable in front of others, and as a result, they are lonely for not being fully seen. Explaining this body of work, Oliver Herring also points out that artist David Wojnarowicz wrote in his diaries about nudity, which he likened to a weapon that can be wielded to enforce visibility. It’s almost impossible not to look at a naked body.
Through painting, photography, text, and video, Juliana Huxtable has defined a singular aesthetic rooted in digital culture, particularly Tumblr-era visual identity, a kind of collaged rap and visual rapture. Her work offers a critical perspective on identity, particularly her own as a Black trans woman, reflecting on reality through the lens of personal structural experience. Huxtable re-examines our understanding of ‘the image’ and ‘the human,’ portraying intersectionality and speculative social archetypes as methods of resistance and liberation.
Young-jun Tak examines sociocultural and psychological mechanisms that shape belief systems, ranging from worshipped objects to sophisticated religious structures. Mixing media, techniques, and subject matter, Tak employs obfuscation as a mode of critique. In his sculptures, installations, and films, he exposes human bodies within polarizing norms and conventions, attempting to dissolve fossilized aesthetics—byproducts of polarization and exclusion—found in religious icons, propaganda tools, protest materials, and gender symbols. The second film in his choreography series, Love Your Clean Feet on Thursday (2023), challenges hyper-binary gender notions through queer male bodies and movements. It juxtaposes two contrasting representations: the hypermasculinity of Spanish Legion soldiers carrying a life-sized crucifix in Málaga during Holy Week and the hyper-femininity in Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet Manon (1974), where male dancers repeatedly lift the female protagonist. Alternating between these scenes, the film follows six male dancers performing choreography inspired by Manon in Berlin’s popular gay cruising forest, Grunewald, bridging the gap between these seemingly opposing yet strangely parallel gendered performances.
Artist bios:
Andrius Alvarez-Backus (b. 1999) is an artist pursuing an MFA at Columbia University (expected 2025) after earning a BFA from The Cooper Union (2023). His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Fitchburg Art Museum, where he had his first museum solo show, Desastre! (2023). Alvarez-Backus has received honors such as the Richard Lewis Bloch Memorial Prize and will be the inaugural Nicholas Dahl Visiting Artist at the Provincetown Art Association & Museum in 2025.
Cameron Patricia Downey (b. 1998, Minneapolis) is an anti-disciplinary artist working across sculpture, photography, film, and curation. Their work has been exhibited at institutions including the Walker Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, and T293 Gallery. Downey was the 2023 recipient of the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation’s MN Art Prize and has participated in residencies at Loghaven, Second Shift, and Juxtaposition Arts. They hold a BA in visual art and environmental science from Columbia University and are an MFA candidate in sculpture at Yale.
Gordon Hall (b. 1983) is a New York-based sculptor, performance-maker, and writer. Hall has had solo exhibitions at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Renaissance Society, and MIT List Visual Arts Center. Their work has been shown at the Whitney Museum, The Drawing Center, and David Zwirner. Since 2011, Hall has directed the Center for Experimental Lectures, producing programs at MoMA PS1, Artists Space, and the Whitney Biennial.
Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov (b. 1988) is an interdisciplinary artist exploring transformation, identity, and the intersections of nature and technology. He has participated in residencies including Skowhegan (2023) and ISCP (2022) and exhibited at the 4th Ural Industrial Biennial, the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial, and institutions such as the Tretyakov Gallery. Recent solo exhibitions include Museum of Skins at Ncontemporary, Milan (2024), and Snake Changing Skin at Fragment Gallery, New York (2023).
Jesús Hilario-Reyes (b. 1996, San Juan, Puerto Rico) is an interdisciplinary artist and first-year MFA candidate in sculpture at Yale. He has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Black Star Film Festival and is a recipient of fellowships from Lighthouse Works, Bemis Center, and Leslie Lohman.
Oliver Herring (b. 1964, Germany, based in Brooklyn) is a visual artist known for experimental techniques examining human nature and interpersonal dynamics. His work has been widely exhibited, including at MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum, and the Hirshhorn Museum, as well as internationally at the Camden Art Centre, Kyoto Art Center, and Lyon Biennale.
Juliana Huxtable (b. 1987, Bryan-College Station, TX, based in New York) is an artist, writer, musician, and performer whose work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, ICA Boston, and Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. Her work is in the collections of the Guggenheim, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art.
Young-jun Tak (b. 1989, Seoul, lives in Berlin) examines belief systems through his art. He has had solo exhibitions at PHILIPPZOLLINGER (Zurich), Julia Stoschek Foundation (Berlin/Düsseldorf), and Atelier Hermès (Seoul). His work has been included in the Lyon Biennale, Bangkok Art Biennale, Chicago Architecture Biennial, and Berlin Biennale, and is part of the Julia Stoschek Collection, Burger Collection, and the Seoul Museum of Art Collection.
