BROOKLYN, NY.- Cleveland Print Room hosts a joint exhibition featuring the Cleveland debut of internationally-shown, NYC-based artist Lissa Rivera, and new work by Cleveland artist Laura Ruth Bidwell.
“Beautiful Boy,” the ongoing project of Lissa Rivera, focuses, as she writes, “on my domestic partner as muse, documenting our exploration of femininity and the nuances of photography as a transformative medium. I am using photography as a testing ground for my partner, who is genderqueer, to visualize multiple feminine identities. The photographs provide a canvas to investigate the visual language of womanhood that I was raised with, and that my partner is only beginning to explore. Through watching movies, listening to music and viewing countless photographs, I’ve absorbed an archive of techniques to share. The photographs recall childhood fantasies of dressing up, tapping into deep-seated narratives about desire, beauty, freedom and cultural taboo. Although our emotional relationship is private and real, we perform a romanticism that is obsessive and decadent. The fantasy of dressing up transforms the experience of being photographed into one that fuses identity-creation with image-creation.” Rivera is represented by ClampArt.
About her new work for this exhibition, from her “Gratiot” series, Laura Ruth Bidwell states, “GRATIOT is a name. A place. A state of mind. Gratiot is a photographic project based on the fictional lives of Charles and Victoire Chouteau Gratiot, immortals who have navigated and thrived by night, across three centuries.”
Brooklyn, N.Y. photographer Lissa Rivera and her muse, BJ Lillis, along with Cleveland photographer Laura Bidwell, will discuss their complementary projects at the Cleveland Print Room at 4 p.m. Sept. 9, a day after the show opens. Rivera’s installation is called “Beautiful Boy.” Bidwell’s is called “Gratiot.”
Sponsored by the Akron Art Museum, the gallery talk will focus on Rivera’s evocative and romantic celebration of Lillis, her “genderqueer” partner. “Beautiful Boy” explores notions of gender and identity, fusing the classical and the contemporary in purposefully ambiguous, highly theatrical images.
According to a recent article in the New York Times, Lillis told his co-worker, Rivera, that he’d always preferred dressing in women’s clothing but felt he couldn’t in an office setting, creating a feeling that undermined his confidence. Rivera offered to take his portrait “dressed as he wished,” thereby affirming his identity. The artistic relationship blossomed and the two became lovers. Over the years, as Rivera – a sometime museum curator who is represented by ClampArt, New York – has photographed Lillis in all manner of settings and attire, a kind of narrative also seems to have gotten a grip.
“So much of identity is constructed from looking at pictures,” Rivera told the Times. “Looking at photographs and looking at a film can really change who you are.” Not to mention turn Lillis, a kind of genetic code-breaker, into an icon.
Bidwell, who is co-founder of the Transformer Station in Hingetown, touches on history in “Gratiot,” portraying the imaginary lives of Charles and Victoire Chouteau Gratiot, “immortals who have navigated and thrived by night, across three centuries,” according to her artist’s statement. Inspired by two friends of hers – friends she calls “dark, beautiful, mysterious, creative and very much in love” – Bidwell’s “Gratiot” promises to illuminate a singular fictional world through photographs and artifacts.
Whether her mysterious friends will add to the illumination of “Gratiot,” which Bidwell also calls a state of mind and a place, on Sept. 9 is open to question.
