1155 Lyman Ave.
Tom Burtonwood & Holly Holmes, hosts
Scott Hunter, curator
Aay Preston Myint, artist
A flag for Black death (always flies at full mast) by Aay Preston-Myint
I am interested in the format of the flag as a way to communicate ideas of contingency, emergency, and confusion, versus its more common use to portray a sense of national permanence or historical import. How might the vocabulary of the flag be used to describe queerness, nothingness, death, and invisibility? In this moment, there is much talk of rainbows, stripes, stars and bars. The visual icons of nation and state become representations of a society that is increasingly stratified, not simply across economic classes, but also across levels of citizenship. What would it mean to look at the flag and see my condition represented?
Aay Preston-Myint is an artist, printmaker, and educator based in Chicago, IL. His practice employs both visual and collaborative strategies to investigate memory and kinship, within the context of queer community and history. In addition to his own work in interdisciplinary media, he is a founder of No Coast, an artist partnership that prints and distributes affordable contemporary artwork, serves as a DJ and organizer for Chances Dances, party that supports and showcases the work of queer artists in Chicago, and is editor-in-chief of an online and print journal called Monsters and Dust.
Scott J Hunter is a collector of contemporary works, arts activist, and an independent curator, focusing on group exhibitions examining relationships among culture, identity, and psychological process. An academic pediatric neuropsychologist, Scott has, with his curatorial practice and collecting, been increasingly engaging the intersection between developmental phenomenology and artistic practice, and considering how elements of self are projected into and interpreted through performance and object making.