DILJÁ ÞORVALDS

From handout:

But how do we see ourselves? What happens when we show that inner side to someone else? Does it seem silly? Or less bad? Or worse? Does it lead to connecting to someone else? Or getting further away?

Diljá creates muddled, abstract embroidery on silkscreen frames, the same sorts of frames in the same sorts of sizes that queer people have used to create t-shirts for past 70 years. The sorts of t-shirts that said the sorts of things, connected the sorts of communities, that no store in their right mind would sell.

As a Black queer artist, André makes photographs. Angry, and sad, and sometimes giddily celebratory pictures. An image of medication hangs near an image Andre’s blurred body, face tripled, sci-fi and so dark that only eyes and a grinning mouth are clear.

Both artists show work that is boldly navel gaze-y, de- liberately non-opaque. Both artists pull apart separate experiences, one as a Black queer person in the American south, and one as a white Icelandic woman delving into her own queer identity for the first time. And both explore a universal experience of queerness, in which isolation, potential violence and potential connection exist as three halves of an overlarge whole.