Jordan Reznick’s solo exhibition Gallery of Illustrious Queers curated by Margaret Tedesco, with limited edition writing by Rob Fatal, is on display October 22, 2019 through February 20, 2020 at the James C. Hormel LGTBQIA Center in San Francisco.
The title of the project references Mathew Brady’s nineteenth century “Gallery of Illustrious Americans” that made the act of sitting for one’s portrait a moral act of nation-building for white Americans. As a counter-archive, these portraits intervene in the normalizing power of typical cultural icons. Impudent gazes command the respect due to gender outlaws. Gentle gestures invite us to sense the fragility of human life. The hope is that they present the dignity of trans experience without sacrificing the strangeness and ordinariness that characterizes each of us.
James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center
100 Larkin Street, 3rd floor
San Francisco, Calif.
Image caption: x, Ithaca, New York, 2018 (56x42", archival pigment on cotton)