Lip A film collaboration between Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg 1999, 10 minutes, Color

It is Hollywood’s favorite role for black women: the maid. Sassy or sweet, snickeringly attentive or flippantly dismissive, the performers who play them steal every scene they are in, and Tracy Moffatt’s entertaining video collage reveals the narrow margin Hollywood has allowed black actresses to shine in. But shine they do. Giving lip is proven an art form in these scenes from 1930’s cinema to present-day movies featuring a remarkable roster of undervalued actresses and their more celebrated white costars. Moffatt and Hillberg’s rough, no-budget assembly effectively highlights with familiarity and humor the disturbing realization of how black characters and white characters still interact on screen, under Hollywood’s eternally backwards eye.

via WOMEN MAKE MOVIES | Lip

Tracey Moffatt (by BrooklynMuseum)

“I didn’t even stop to wait for the right to make art, I just did it”

“…we know most Black actresses were forced to play the maid. And what I’m trying to say with ‘Lip’ is that, yes, unfortunately a lot of these brilliant women actresses were forced to play the maid, but what a good job they did.”

Moffat usually really avoids attempts to label her work by it’s recurring themes of race and sexual politics, but she does half seriously answer questions here about feminism, Hollywood, race and her classic short film Lip. Plus she cites beating up her brother as a feminist act.

via Deborah Kelly video Artabase

Artabase is happy to showcase an excerpt of a new work commissioned by RiAus Gallery, Adelaide Australia, by cross media artist Deborah Kelly. The work was shown in LIFE 2.0 – artifice to synthesis, an exhibition curated by Melinda Rackham, investigated the artifice and synthesis of nature and technology, genetic manipulation and synthetic biology.

The video, Beastliness – vividly animated vignettes of surreally synthetic creatures. Women morph into hybrid forms that already exist in the vernacular of the feminine – such as birds, foxes, bunnies, tigers and chicks. Highly stylised emblems of artifice, Kelly’s beasts walk an elegant line between fantasy, fashion and the femme fatale.

LIFE 2 .0 asks more questions than it answers. How can we determine what is natural when life is built from scratch and artifice is achieved by synthesis? How does the definition of life change with human endeavor and scientific exploration? Is Synthetic Biology pure engineering; dangerously playing God; or a spontaneous working together of different species to create a better world?

Video at the link

dirtylibrarianthoughts:

Ghada Amer, Barbie Loves Ken, Ken Loves Barbie, 1995/2000

embroidery on cotton

Maryam Farnaz Rostami performs as the exotic Mona G. Hawd.

Performance artist Maryam Farnaz Rostami has taken a novel stab at the search for the American dream and the experiences of Iranian immigrants in her new full-length show, “Persepolis, Texas” - a story told through the eyes of Mona G. Hawd, Rostami’s audacious drag queen persona. Rostami’s semiautobiographical look at the experiences of minorities is a rollicking ride through life in Texas, suburban dyspepsia and the exoticization of Iranian women, all while utilizing drag as a mechanism for speaking about not just gender but also immigration, hyphenated identities and a host of other issues.

via Persepolis, Texas: Drag show meets Mideast culture - SFGate

sophiawallace:

Thank you for the lovely post genderqueer and everyone how Voted for me. You made my day.

Portrait from Sophia Wallace’s series “On Beauty”.

According to the project description, Wallace “…was curious to see what the result would be if [she] photographed men using the unspoken rules that dictate the way women are conventionally posed in photographs and paintings.”

You can vote for Sophia Wallace’s work at the ArtTakesLondon competition (no registration of any kind is necessary). *You can vote every 24 hours.

[Image description: photo of a light-skinned, short haired young man, taken from slightly above, showing his head and upper torso. He is wearing only a black, see-through sweater which merges against the black backdrop. He is gazing towards one side. He holds his arms against his body; one hand is placed on his stomach and the other on his neck, holding the sweater against his body, although part of his shoulders and chest are bared.]

genderqueer:

This photo series by JJ Levine, Switch, is amazing. Several pairs of people pose as a couple, one dressed “masculine” and the other “feminine”, and then they switch outfits. Some persons are hardly recognizable from one picture to the next.

(via Recommendation: Switch — Genderfork)

(via thefeeloffree)

textilenerd:

awesomenesssaveslives:

alexandraemeric:

Sarojini Naidu & Bhagat Singh, dye, ink, cotton thread, hand painted warp, double weave 16”x20” Fall 2008

So, you scored a fantastic art residency in San Francisco at CELLspace’s Project 2048. What will you be using the time to do?

Ooh yes! Every so often I’ll learn about some awesome performer or find out about some conference or other that would almost always be based in San Francisco, and for a while I’d idly wondered about going there and spending some time being creative and exploring things. A few months ago I decided to make it more of a structured challenge, and applied for the residency largely on my principle to “apply for anything interesting” – I didn’t expect to be accepted so quickly!

In my residency I plan to explore how gender, sexuality, and culture intersect, and transform my experiences and perspectives of love, relationships, and being a minority in multiple ways into performance pieces. It’s a culmination of ideas I’ve had for performances, especially since I want to go beyond typical burlesque and take more risks, but it wasn’t until mentors and inspirations like Sunny Drake actually challenged me to *do something about it* rather than sit there and wonder (and drown in my fear) that I started getting proactive.

 Interview: Tiara the Merch Girl by Becky Hunter

Admirers of Tiara’s quest for International Art Awesomeness can donate to her sanfranplan here and follow her tumblr here.

femmestyles:

I love, love, love this photo, and that dress! Please meet Lola Love aka Misster Raju Rage. Misster also puts out a zine, Masculine Femininities:

Masculine Femininities is a free zine about gender Identities – masculinity and/or femininity and its complexity– stories, poetry, images and all those things that don’t get discussed, all those gender minorities that do not get enough recognition, visibility or representation. It comprises of people of colour, trans femme boys, faggy butches, masculine females, feminine males, trans male drag queens, gender variants, andogynes, masculine people and femmes of all genders and then some!

masculinefemininities.wordpress.com

(via sylviaandherfigtree)

St.George Bank Brisbane International Film Festival

Phoebe Harts’ documentary Orchids:My Intersex Adventure makes it’s world premiere tomorrow in Brisbane!

Please humour me for a moment, as I tell you how happy I am that this is happening in Brisbane, from a local queer artist in collaboration with an awesome director like Ali Russell.

Brisbane has a residual reputation, deserving or not, as being the runner up of Oz arts and queer activism, compared to Sydney and Melbourne.

To be fair, when I made tentative motions to speak on intersex locally, I was alternately appalled and nonplussed at how ignorant even some very visible queer group advocates were in response.

That said! Brisvegas is random. For every person who responds to the fishbowl experience with distance or attitude, someone else responds with experimentation and enthusiasm. So big thanks to Hart and Russell for their efforts, I’m really looking forward to this. 

p.s. If you’re going, I’ll be the 30-ish redhead who may have a youngish teenager in tow. Whatever, come say hi.

curate:

Image: Kelli Connell, Carnival, 2008, digital chromogenic print

Tomboy is an art exhibition that examines the degrees to which identity and gender influence the work of six contemporary queer women artists. This exhibition explores the variety of approaches artists take in negotiating notions of identity: from painterly gestures to performance, sculptural installations to digitally altered photographs.

Columbia College Chicago : Tomboy Explores Notions of Identity h/t claudineise

glbtq » Special Features » Tina Fiveash: A Retrospective

Peter I, 1999. From Tina Fiveash’s series documenting her friend Peters transition.