When the Colors Fade: A Queer Riot Against Corporate Pride
The Queer Art Collective • Pawtucket, RI • thequeerartcollective.org • July 6–October 5, 2021
The Queer Art Collective (QAC) is one of the most recent additions to the Rhode Island art scene, opening their inaugural exhibition this past March in the Pawtucket Armory. QAC is a space devoted to highlighting, supporting, and sharing the works and stories of queer artists. It’s newest show When the Colors Fade: A Queer Riot Against Corporate Pride, brings together six artists from the United States and Canada to explore the ways capitalism and corporations have been deleterious to queer culture. Artists Nicole MelNicky, Lauren Packard, Joe Welch, T. Taumanu, Becka Shertzer, and Alice Kay Waller, working in installation, painting, and ceramics, bring a multifaceted approach to the unique location.
A significant feature of the show is Alice Kay Waller’s continuation of the /200 project. She has previously presented iterations of it in Winston Salem, West Palm Beach, Indianapolis, and Chattanooga. In this project, she has been casting bodies of survivors of sexual assault and using them to build formidable remembrances. By offering open castings to local survivors, Waller aims to support them in the reclamation of their bodies and the battle against assault. En masse, these casts are a bulwark of intimate encounters between artist, survivor, and viewer that are as beautiful as they are poignant.
QAC has brought together an ambitious selection of artists working with distinguished tactility. Lauren Packard’s expressive mixed media abstractions play nicely against Joe Welch’s hand crafted ceramic sculptures. Packard, a Brooklyn-based artist, explores memories of queerness and fights against trauma related to heteronormativity in her work. Such as in Armor Dyke Honor, which is included in the exhibition. Welch’s piece Schism stands opposite Waller’s installation—hand and body are embedded throughout the space. This exhibition combats issues regarding queerness in a heteronormative culture with the physicality of lived experience ever-present.
This second exhibition at QAC will remain installed through October 5 and will include various programmings such as pop-ups and possible concert series. The gallery also contains a small shop with works available by several U.S.-based and international artists.
—Abbi Kenny