JD Pluecker presents a closet into which we can delve, wandering through ancestral sites and familial history. Entering with two small needlepoint bricks that hold the door open, we walk into a gallery where family blood lineage and queer history live side by side. It is a soft room with a plethora of collections upon which to immerse your attention.
The Unsettlements: Moms is a starting point for the artist’s investigation into the lives and legacy of Claire D. Pluecker, their birth mom, and Linda L. Anderson, the person the artists refers to as their “dyke mom.” The exhibition consists of “object poems” combining written and spoken words, graphite drawings, tracings, embroidery, found materials from land sites, and archival gems. To collect the materials, the artist visited over six physical sites in Texas and sourced through countless boxes of family documents belonging to both mothers (which the artist considers alternate sites). Their new works unearth complicated lives that are both familiar and different as the artist “attempts to consider the legacies of white supremacy and the wonders of queerness and femininity in the same space and time.”
While Pluecker’s work typically is reunited with the sites or archives origins from which they were discovered, this exhibition marks a trepidatious and exciting entry into object making with new embroidered thread works. This exhibition’s “object poems” begin a journey that will continue to evolve.
