PLEASURE CRUISE
Exhibiting Artists:
Gabriel Martinez, Joe Sinness, Janie Stamm, Dustin Yager
Exhibition Dates:
October 1 - December 18, 2021
Opening Reception:
Friday, October 1, 2021, 5:00-9:00pm
Artist Talks:
Gabriel Martinez, Saturday, October 2 @ 11:00am
Janie Stamm, Saturday, November 13 @ 11:00am
Rivalry Projects is thrilled to announce our final exhibit for 2021, Pleasure Cruise. Originating from concepts underpinning vessels, cruising, and queer liminal spaces found at sea *, Pleasure Cruise is a group exhibition of artists working within photography, ceramics, drawing, and sculpture, whose art utilizes queerness, camp, the handmade, and humor. Pleasure Cruise features artwork by Gabriel Martinez, Joe Sinness, Janie Stamm, and Dustin Yager. It is on view at Rivalry from October 1-December 18, 2021.
From hand-built ceramics dribbled with slip and layered in emoji, to S&M bedecked seashells, to meticulously penciled still-lifes, and photographs that mediate space between memory and the body, Pleasure Cruise gives form to an ecology of queer contemporary artists and highlights the intersectionality of visibility, identity, and geography while expanding the understanding of what constitutes Queer contemporary art.
WORKS
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Gabriel Martinez (he/him) is a photo-based multidisciplinary artist and educator born and raised in Miami, Florida. He was a Pew Fellowship in the Arts recipient in 2001, received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship in 2003, and was recently awarded both a 2019 Independent Creative Production Grant from the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation and a 2019 Independence Foundation Fellowship. He has participated in several artist residency programs including: the Rosenbach Museum, the Fabric Workshop, the Fountainhead Residency, Arcadia Summer Arts Program, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Banff Centre, the Studios at MASS MoCA and the Joan Mitchell Center.
Martinez attended the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting in 2003, and received his MFA from Tyler School of Art in 1991 and his BFA from the University of Florida in 1998. He has been teaching in the Photo Program for the Department of Fine Arts, PennDesign for the last 20 years. He serves on the Advisory Board for the Center for the Emerging Visual Artist, Philadelphia Photo Arts Center and Galaei (a Queer LatinX social justice organization).
His work is included in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Fabric Workshop & Museum and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.
Joe Sinness (he/him) is a visual artist who creates intricate drawings and works on paper culled from detritus, flora, fauna, pornography, kitch, and material comforts. Rendered in color pencil these still lifes take on lives of their own, pointing beyond the frame of the drawing and invoking displaced histories tied to their material referents. Specifically, Sinness sees his artwork as a chance to balance an urge for heteronormative assimilation with more authentic subversion. The work is a personal means for visualizing desire and transforming shame into dignity and pride.
Joe Sinness holds an MFA in Studio Art from the Minnesota College of Art and Design (MCAD). Sinness is also a two-time recipient of the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship (2019, 2013) and was the 2017 recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board and was a 2015 Artist-In-Residence with the Fire Island Artist Residency in Cherry Grove. His artwork can be found in numerous private collections, as well as the permanent collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Macalester College, and the Tweed Museum of Art.
Janie Stamm (she/her) was born and raised on the edge of the Everglades in Broward County, Florida. She is a craft-based artist currently residing on the western banks of the Mississippi River in Saint Louis, Missouri. Her work focuses on preserving Florida’s environmental and Queer history in the face of climate change. She uses a craft-based practice to tell these stories.
In the spring of 2019, Janie received an MFA in Visual Art from Washington University in Saint Louis. She was most recently the recipient of the 2019 John T. Milliken Foreign Travel Graduate Award, a Regional Arts Commission grant, a Critical Mass grant, a Dubinsky Scholarship to study at the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Frida Kahlo Creative Arts Award from Washington University in St. Louis. Her work was featured on the cover of the December 2016 issue of Poetry magazine and in the spring 2021 issue of CandyFloss Magazine. Janie has shown work throughout the country including Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, and throughout the Saint Louis regional area. She was an artist in residence at ACRE in Wisconsin, the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, Aquarium Gallery in New Orleans, and SAFTA in Tennessee. Janie is a teaching artist-in-residence at the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis.
Dustin Yager (he/they) is a ceramic artist whose work deals with popular perceptions of pottery, taste, class, and all that goes along with it. Recent work includes hand-built ceramic forms whose surfaces become distribution sites of cultural imagery, memes, and inscriptions, each resulting in overloaded visual surfaces whose ultimate task is to observe and absorb while highlighting absurdities within toxic media environments and cultural conflagrations.
His work has been exhibited nationally, including exhibitions in Chicago, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Kansas City, and he has given presentations about his work and academic research at the Walker Art Center, the National Council for Education in the Ceramic Arts, The Soap Factory, The American Craft Council, and elsewhere. Yager earned a Master of Arts degree in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and holds a BA from Carleton College. Now living and working in Brooklyn, NY, he is originally from Wyoming.