Zackary Drucker

The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See

June 6 – July 2, 2009

Zackary Drucker - Steve Turner Contemporary
Zackary Drucker - Steve Turner Contemporary
Zackary Drucker - Steve Turner Contemporary
Zackary Drucker - Steve Turner Contemporary
Zackary Drucker - Steve Turner Contemporary
Zackary Drucker - Steve Turner Contemporary
Zackary Drucker - Steve Turner Contemporary
Zackary Drucker - Steve Turner Contemporary
Zackary Drucker - Steve Turner Contemporary
Zackary Drucker - Steve Turner Contemporary
Zackary Drucker - Steve Turner Contemporary

The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See. Documentation of performance at Steve Turner Contemporary, June 2009

The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See. Documentation of performance at Steve Turner Contemporary, June 2009

The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See. Documentation of performance at Steve Turner Contemporary, June 2009

The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See. Documentation of performance at Steve Turner Contemporary, June 2009

The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See. Documentation of performance at Steve Turner Contemporary, June 2009

The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See. Documentation of performance at Steve Turner Contemporary, June 2009

The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See. Documentation of performance at Steve Turner Contemporary, June 2009

The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See. Documentation of performance at Steve Turner Contemporary, June 2009

The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See. Documentation of performance at Steve Turner Contemporary, June 2009

The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See. Documentation of performance at Steve Turner Contemporary, June 2009

The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See. Documentation of performance at Steve Turner Contemporary, June 2009

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Steve Turner Contemporary presents The Inability to Be Looked At and The Horror of Nothing to See , a video installation by Los Angeles artist Zackary Drucker. The exhibition features documentation and ephemera from a performance which the artist presented in the same room on May 30, 2009. It is a site-specific phantasm that explores masochistic identity construction, new-age tyranny, and collective experience. Viewers were directed through a series of breathing exercises, visions, and traumas, while participants pluck hair from the androgynous, stripped body of the artist.

Zackary Drucker is a limp-wristed, switch queen/Los Angeles-based artist. Infusing elements of installation, performance, text, photography, and video, Drucker’s work explores under-recognized aspects of queer history while simultaneously inscribing her own experience and position within it. Drucker reactivates Bruce Rodgers’ The Queens’ Vernacular , documents relationships and secret legacies, and challenges conventions of entertainment and drag performance, as well as existing art-historical representations of queer people. Oscilating between documentary, mythology, and personal narrative, the work is an overall novel exploration of gender as it is constructed, deconstructed, and experienced.

Drucker earned a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2007 and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2005. Drucker has performed at Visions of Excess at the SPILL Festival, London, 2009; Resonate/Obliterate at the University of California Riverside, 2009; Wildness at Silver Platter, Los Angeles, 2008/09; Night of the Living Dolls at UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2007; and Artstar at Deitch Projects, New York, 2006. Recent screenings include MIX 2008 , New York; Gender Bender VI Edition , Bologna, Italy, 2008; Les Rencontres Internationales , Paris/Berlin/Madrid, 2008; and Brooklyn is Burning , New York, 2009.