We are a Chicago-based collective of artists and thinkers interested in exploring and embracing difference, otherness and transgression. We name this otherness and transgression, Queer. We are motivated to expand upon  past and present understandings and conceptualizations of Queerness located outside the sexualized body. We are interested in a Queerness that emphasizes ambivalences, shifting boundaries and re-imagined social constructions*.  We aim to render norms questionable. It is through a collaborative, non-hierarchical, and malleable practice that we are creating the venue for shifting identities. It is through creation, a fundamental tool of articulation, that we reflect our community - a community defined outside fixed categories of identity. It is through publication and curation that these ideas become manifest.

Our mission is to foster inclusive spaces for Queer discourse. We support the development, sharing, and critique of contemporary work by emerging artists. We do not seek consensus, but a community composed of multiplicities and differences as amorphous as Queer identity itself.

 

*Adapted in part from Brooker, Peter. A Concise Glossary of Cultural Theory. London: Arnold, 1999.

 

statement written collaboratively by Magritte Nankin, E. Bennett Jones, Amina Ross, NIC Kay, Charles Shields and Paul Smith