With These Queer Hands: Object Making Today

R & Company and GAYLETTER present WITH THESE QUEER HANDS: Object Making Today, a Zoom Talk with artists Jovencio de la Paz, Liz Collins, and Thomas Barger, moderated by Tyler Akers, Arts Editor of GAYLETTER.
Like the original exhibition of Objects: USA that opened in 1969, the 2020 edition at R & Company celebrates the diversity of practices and backgrounds that make up the rich fabric of American handmade arts. In celebration of Pride 2021, we hear from these three queer artists featured in the exhibition, exploring their work and discussing how their identity and communities impact their practice and approach to object making.
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ABOUT THE PANELISTS
Jovencio de la Paz works between digital technology and hand weaving. By creating specialized designed software and drawing tools, de la Paz collaborates with algorithms and self-generating patterns to explore the related histories of technology and the loom. The resulting textiles, hand-woven on a computerized Thread Controller loom, display a tension between the physical world and the digital, the organic and technological, and the haptic quality of cloth versus the perceived rigidity of the numerical.
Liz Collins is an artist who draws from the materials, processes, and techniques of fiber and textile media. Employing a range of materials, she incorporates vivid palettes and dynamic patterning to create work that varies in scale, from the object-based to the immersive and architectural and straddles the divides between the functional, the decorative, and the expressive.
Thomas Barger is originally from Mattoon, Illinois, and now based in New York City. His iconography alludes to the farmyard, applying motifs of tractor tires, laundry baskets, and sticks of butter. Barger constructs his work using painted paper pulp built over armatures, which results in chic minimalistic forms that convey the sophistication and creative energy of the New York design market.
Tyler Akers an artist, writer, and editor whose works on paper, paintings, and installations explore how language and labels change over time. Akers lives in Brooklyn and serves as the Art Editor of GAYLETTER.