The Unsettlements: Moms

JD Pluecker

In Residence: Sep 26 – Nov 21, 2022

Exhibition: Nov 17, 2022 – Jan 8, 2023


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. 

Artist

JD Pluecker

Houston, Texas

JD Pluecker works with language, that is, a material thing, a thing of life and history. Their undisciplinary work inhabits the intersections of writing, history, translation, art, interpreting, bookmaking, queer/trans aesthetics, non-normative poetics, language justice, and cross-border cultural production. They have translated numerous books from the Spanish, including Gore Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018), Antígona González (Les Figues Press, 2016), Writing with Caca by Luis Felipe Fabre (Green Lantern Press, 2021), and forthcoming Trash by Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny(Deep Vellum Press, 2023). JD’s book of poetry and image, Ford Over, was released in 2016 from Noemi Press, and in 2019 Lawndale Art Center supported the publication of the artist book, The Unsettlements: Dad. From 2010-2020, they worked as part of the transdisciplinary collaborative Antena Aire and from 2015-2020 with the local social justice interpreting collective Antena Houston. JD edits chapbooks with Ugly Duckling Presse’s Señal series, is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writing Grant, and has exhibited work at Blaffer Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, Project Row Houses, and more. More info at www.jdpluecker.com and www.antenaantena.org.

See More

Curator

Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy

Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy (MX) started her tenure as Director at Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as Witte de With) in January 2018, after being the curator of contemporary art at Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in Caracas and New York from 2011 to 2017. In 2016-2017, she was also guest curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York. In 2013, Sofía was artistic director and chief curator of the 9a Bienal do Mercosul | Porto Alegre in Brazil, and before that, she was an agent of dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel. In the past, Sofía has been director of Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and held curatorial positions in New York at Art in General and Americas Society. She is also a board member of Council in Paris and of Creative Time in New York. 

See More

Related
Exhibitions

View