On August 6, at the Community House, coordinators Chris Bogia and Maya Suess introduced this year’s Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR) artists and their work to the community. Each artist showed slides of her or his work, told us about it, and answered some questions.
Hannah Bisgard Barrett, from Brooklyn, showed us a series of her works—“something between a painting and a photograph”—based on her parents and herself; ones of genetic scientists, her parents’ friends, giving “a sci-fi spin on gender and heredity;” work based on Old Masters; gender-bending paintings, clearly of men, in tutus and other ‘feminine’ garb, which she did in Boston; drawings based on images of Hitler and Queen Elizabeth II, in response to “a critic’s challenge that [she] didn’t do anything subversive” in her art; and a series based on British and American actors that she admires.
Babirye Leilah, who lives 10 miles outside Kampala, Uganda, and identifies herself as an activist and an artist, showed and spoke of her work, moving, painful, highly political, and often almost reducing us to tears. She offered a series, on metal or wood, based on women’s hairstyles; rainbow masks and traditional wooden African masks; her work with children, showing their sculpture; a large work made entirely of plastic bottles, explaining, “Since many [in Uganda] call gay people rubbish, I decided to collect the rubbish from dustbins to create something beautiful;” wood carvings she did in Nairobi, Kenya; “equality for all,” in concrete, which she made in Tanzania; and sculptures she did in Scotland. She talked about life in her country under the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, introduced in Parliament in 2009 and passed in 2014, and about making it onto the newspapers’ “Ugandan Homo Cabinet List” of suspected gays. She incorporates chains and padlocks into many of her works, in response to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill’s calling for seven-year prison sentences for those found to be gay. On a positive note, she told us that a Pride Parade is scheduled to occur in Uganda this year. As part of the residency, Leilah plans to create work inspired by Cherry Grove’s drag queens.
Dominic Nurre, from New York and originally from Minnesota, is currently working on sanding and polishing coconuts—“a reductive work—reducing something to reveal it”—bringing faces out in the coconuts and photographing them. “Photography is very important to my work,” Dominic said. His work also incorporates portraits of his boyfriend. Declaring, “A sculpture is an event,” he showed a slide of a stick of plain white pine, which he whittled down and then photographed, so that it exists as both the sculpture and the photograph of it. He also displayed 1970s nude male photos on which he replaced the penises with bursts of light.
Devan Shimoyama, from Philadelphia, said, “I’m primarily a painter,” who works more in graphite or colored pencils than paint, and is also getting into printmaking. He showed us three-dimensional self-portraits, some incorporating childhood toys and glitter; one of himself as a mermaid; and others including sexual, divine, and fairy-tale malevolent figures. He spoke of his openly lesbian mother and of her coming out to him. He has been working on paintings looking at blackness and at nighttime “as a place where magic can happen.” Some of his works are responses to the murders in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and on Staten Island.
Joe Sinness, originally from North Dakota and living in Minneapolis, declared, “I love kitsch,” which he considers “not a dirty word. He showed his work in gold lamé, lit by Christmas lights, a tribute to Tennessee Williams; a work showing part of Rock Hudson’s face, seen through a glory hole, surrounded by flowers, imagining “what it would be like to get a blowjob from Rock Hudson;” an altar piece of flowers, including an image of ones given to Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice, “when she gets on the boat,” in “Funny Girl,” arranged as a “tribute to a beautiful butt;” and works inspired by “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Suddenly Last Summer.”