Date and Time
Tuesday, Jun, 27 - Saturday, Oct 21, 2023
11:00 — 5:00 pm
Location
Admission
FREE
Aaron McIntosh interrogates the intertwined relationships between humans and plants—our interdependence, our co-evolution, and our history of hierarchies—across many artistic mediums. In Entanglements, the artist takes up the metaphoric potential of plant life where he finds speculative roots to scaffold and explore queer ecologies. McIntosh rejects colonialist and heteronormative paradigms that dominate botany in its perpetual “othering” of queerness. Instead, he asks how might we imagine queerness through the sexual and gender-variant dynamisms present in the plant world.
A fourth generation quiltmaker from the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee, McIntosh’s practice is deeply rooted in fibers. He employs this legacy as a language, form, and tool as it offers him both material comfort and a tactile trace of kinship. The quilts, sculptures, and collages on view in the exhibition draw upon images, objects, and stories from McIntosh’s own geographical, cultural, and familiar background, as well as his research in botanical and LGBTQIATS+ archives. Through participatory art making methods, he also draws in queer communities from the places he’s called home.
By embedding queerness into representations of nature, McIntosh envisions a world where diverse queer bodies across time and space are enmeshed with plant life —and where their quilted display envisions new futures for queer and botanical kinship.
Exhibition Publications
Image credit:
Aaron McIntosh, Invasive, 2014. Made in Collaboration with Nick Clifford Simko. Archival digital print. Courtesy of the artist.
Explore the exhibition virtually:
