Disruptive Perspectives

Chicago – Disruptive Perspectives is an exhibition that explores gender, sexuality, and identity. The artists included use photography to articulate an expansive range of identities that cannot be sufficiently characterized using simplistic binaries. Working with a medium that is resolutely still, these artists paradoxically find strategies to explore the idea that identity and often gender itself are adaptable expressions negotiated over time and along a spectrum of possibilities.

Combating narrow-minded presentations, their works lay bare aspects of their private lives and those of their subjects, and in that willingness, invite our empathetic attention. At turns triumphant and at other moments sorrowful or distressing, the artworks included present gender and sexuality as a panoply of possible variations—which for each of us reflect the ongoing complex influences of self, other, and image.

Some highlights of this exhibition include: • The series Relationship by Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst documents not only the couple’s relationship, which lasted from 2008 to 2014, but also their simultaneous gender transitions. Drucker will also be speaking at an upcoming Lecture in Photography, held in conjunction with the Columbia College Chicago Photography Department (see below).

• Columbia College Chicago alumna Jess T. Dugan’s series To Survive on this Shore features empathetic portraits of trans individuals aged 50+, a segment of the American population that is often underrepresented.

• Lorenzo Triburgo’s photographic series Policing Gender uses visual metaphors to document LGBTQ prisoners and how mass incarceration affects the queer community.

This exhibition is co-curated by Allison Grant, Assistant Professor in the Art and Art History Department, University of Alabama and former Assistant Curator of Exhibitions and Education at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago and Nadine Wietlisbach, Director at Photoforum Pasquart in Biel, Switzerland. The exhibition will be presented simultaneously at both curators’ home institutions.