Courtney Harris and Charli Brissey

PRESENTATION OVERVIEW

Inspired by the life and work of early twentieth-century painter Romaine Brooks, 20 Rue Jacob brings Brooks’ unique portraitures to life through video, sound, sculpture, modern dance, drag, and physical theater, resulting in an immersive performance and art installation, while also mirroring salon events of 1920s Paris. Brooks, an American ex-patriot primarily stationed in France and referred to in texts as both a lesbian and bisexual, was a painter most famous for androgynous portraitures of lesbians, masculine women, and female dandies. Her paintings reveal non-traditional qualities of gender fluidity, exposing traces of the underground lifestyle of these rogue individuals. Transgressing the social mandates of their time through self-actualized utopias, these women—referred to by Katherine Anne Porter as “the company of Amazons”—celebrated their sexual freedom by coming together in salon settings that served as hotbeds for cultural, artistic, and political discourse significant to Paris at the turn of the century. Accordingly, the intentions of this project were to create a revisionist artwork that reimagines and honors homosexual voices of the past, while recontextualizing sexuality and gender through current migratory identities using new technologies and cross-disciplinary processes. Co-presenters Charli Brissey and Courtney Harris consider the following questions: What are the possible challenges of portraying historical images that depict real people? How can we consider an historical event, both literary art salons and queer spaces, and re-imagine their design and import today? What are the possibilities of cross-disciplinary collaborations when addressing queer art and identity?

PAST CONFERENCES

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