Adorn The Common Presents: OH HOW QUEER

QUEER culture is resilient and strong, we are natural survivors - the community has an iron chain like bond running through it. It has, and always will have, a lioness like ferocity when it comes to protecting its kin. This show shares a tale of defiance, a story of courage - how LGBTQIA+ people have learned to be seen and heard, overcoming the prejudices of a broken system and live their uncensored lives out in the open.

Each piece you see in this exhibition is an answer to a question “QUEER!”

‘Oh! How Queer’ unpacks a word that, somewhat ironically, has evolved as much as the community it is associated with. Jump back to the early 16th century when “QUEER” was naively entering the English language as a 'plummy’ expression of peculiarity, thrown around almost whimsically to express a sense of pre-modernist intrigue at something out-of-the-ordinary. Skip forward a couple of hundred years and we find our selves in a very different time. Men are no longer adorned in white stockings and tapestry jackets. Theres no need to behead ones wife, or start a new religion for an excuse to separate from her (although arguable not much has changed here).

What comes with the 19th century is a new found sense of masculinity, one that is drenched in the calluses of post industrial revolution and revolts at a shear mollusc of male femininity. And it is here, at the tail end of the century, that the word QUEER is seen as a descriptor for the first time. More specifically to describe Oscar Wilde, at his infamous 1895 trial. Where he and other Homosexuals were referred to as “SNOB QUEERS”… It then isn’t for another 20 years or so, at the tail end of the century that QUEER starts to gain traction as offensive and derogatory slang to reference homosexuals.

Most of us will have grown up in a time where the word QUEER could often be heard billowing from a passing un-taxed, Nissan Micra or something equally as unimaginative, and for a large part of the community the word is still imbedded in deep emotional scaring. Now, we find ourselves sashaying through the 21st century and QUEER, in the west, has almost completely been re-claimed by the community. We are, in fact, at a time where we have young QUEER people who have never experienced the word QUEER as a pejorative.

“OH HOW QUEER” assembles 11 Artists, each exploring their own deeply personal relationship with the word QUEER. Working across a range of disciplines from paint through to sculpture - this curation of works communicates what it means to be part of an ever evolving, ever diversifying, ever marginalised people.

ARTISTS

David Platts

Nic Farr

The Great Indoors

Adorn The Common

Magnus Gjoen

Allan Watson

Ferg Cooper

Thion

Oliver Pavic

Gavin Dobson

Sad Boy