Caitlin Sweet MFA Applied Craft + Design Practicum 2014
Deep Gay Bullshit
Deep Gay Bullshit: Crafting Queer Worlds and Bodies is a project that explores the reparative process of queer bodies organizing around desire, self-determination and collectivity. Deep Gay Bullshit is a series of obsessive moments of layering about how by crafting their bodies and temporal porous worlds, queer people survive structural violence and hegemonic dismissal of queerness as an integral vibrant part of humanity. I use my tacit knowledge of my radical queer community to create craft-based art installations about the queer survival tactic of radical narcissism: the insistence in which our lives, worlds, bodies and communities are valid, beautiful and worth talking about. My installations or ecologies open up space for new forms, meanings and intimacies to thrive and transmute outside of a heteronormative matrix of understanding.
This act of opening is not about knowing or defining but about questioning and fantasizing life outside of the categorizable. Deep Gay Bullshit draws from queer habitus, queer theory and my own corporeality to craft abstract ecstatic seductive moments that position queerness as a shifting space of unlimited transformation and potentiality. This project is about the constant movement of the destabilized queer subject that refuses the gold chains of knowable, categorizable, fixed identity while trying to survive in a world that is brutally oppressive to queer bodies.