June 6 – July 2, 2009
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.
