PAST EXHIBITION
Shimmer Shimmer
Lorenzo Triburgo and Sarah Van Dyck
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PAST EXHIBITION
Shimmer Shimmer
Lorenzo Triburgo and Sarah Van Dyck
Featuring all new figurative and still life photographs created in 2020, Shimmer Shimmer draws influence from a history of queer visual activism, artists using New York City as a site of political disruption, and feminist use of the body as a political site – while staying true to Triburgo’s proclivity for camp aesthetics.
After 10 years of transgender “hormone therapy” Triburgo stopped taking testosterone as a durational performance begun during their residency. The desire to occupy new subjective space inspired the physical changes Triburgo underwent and the ensuing photographs in Shimmer Shimmer.
The figurative images in Shimmer Shimmer feature Triburgo’s glitter-adorned nude form in familiar, gendered, art historical poses, photographed by Van Dyck on location at the historically gay section at the People’s Beach at Jacob Riis Park in Queens, New York (known as Riis Beach), now a haven during the summer months for NYC queers. In Mars Triburgo’s figure is backed by the iconic, boarded-up sanatorium surrounded by barbed-wire fence that has come to symbolize this anti-assimilationist queer space. Lorenzo’s genderqueer body stands strong in an implied forward motion while one arm reaches back and subtle highlights along their fingertips imply strength and hope for the future.
The shimmer of glitter on Triburgo’s figure suggests a mythical, celestial presence and hints at a connection to astrology, an important mode of connecting with queer community for Triburgo and Van Dyck. The still lifes of glitter as “constellations” with titles such as Sextile and Conjunction reiterate this connection and signal to the viewer that the title Mars, for example, refers to the planet not the (gendered) god.
The performative de-medicalization of Triburgo’s body, layered atop subtle gestural shifts of hip position or shoulder height and the metaphorical use of glitter as a representation of change itself—ever-elusive, perceived differently according to light—culminate in binaries coming undone, collapsing into one another or being non-existent where one might expect them to surface.
Lorenzo Triburgo (b. 1980, Bronx, NY) is a Brooklyn-based artist employing performance, photography, video, and audio to cast a critical lens on notions of the “natural,” the construct of gender, and the politics of queer representation. Lorenzo has artworks in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, IL and the Portland Art Museum in Portland, OR and has been featured in Slate, Huffington Port, HuffPo-Live, and the Transgender Studies Reader 2 edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura (Routledge). Lorenzo has exhibited and lectured in cities throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia, including Bruce Silverstein, NYC; Photoforum Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland; Kunst und Kulturhaus, Berne, Switzerland; the Dutch Trading Post, Nagasaki, Japan; The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Magazzini del Sale di Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, Italy; and Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, the Netherlands as the first place winner of the International Pride Photo Award. Lorenzo holds a BFA from New York University in Photography and Gender Studies and an MFA in Photography and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts/ Lorenzo teaches Critical Theory, At, and Gender Studies for Oregon State University’s online campus and in the continuing education program at the School of Visual Arts.
Sarah Van Dyck is an Industrial-Organization (I/O) psychologist who specializes in mixed methods research, blending and translating quantitive data with qualitative audio, visual, and narrative sources. Her professional interests include gender and identity at work, occupational health psychology and disparities in underrepresented populations, and LGBTQIA research in applied settings. She has conducted research with organizations such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Health Care System, National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Center on Work-Family Health and Stress, and Keaiser Permanente Center for Health Research. Sarah was the recipient of a NIOSH Occupational Health Psychology Training Fellowship, and she has co-authored research articles in peer-reviewed publications such as the Journal of Business and Psychology and a variety of translational research outlets. She holds a BA in Sociology/Anthropology from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and an MA in I/O Psychology from Portland State University, where she is currently an ABD doctoral candidate in Applied Psychology. In past and current collaborations with her partner, Lorenzo Triburgo, she created FLUID, Monumental Resistance: Stonewall, and Shimmer Shimmer – video, performance, and photographic projects that represent a call to action to fight for the issues she addresses in her research and life’s work.