Perfect Trouble: Queering Natureculture

Pointing to the fact that the natural world encompasses remarkable gender and sexual diversity, Perfect Trouble: Queering Natureculture presents the work of artists who both challenge the way nature is used to uphold standards of normativity and recognize that the nature-culture divide, and other theoretical binaries, are arbitrary. On view in Glyndor Gallery, this group exhibition features artists Pyaari Azaadi (formerly known as Jaishri Abichandani), Seba Calfuqueo, Young Joon Kwak, Erin Johnson, Diana Sofia Lozano, Sofia Moreno, Christopher Udemezue and Rachel Youn.

Exploring queerness as both inherently natural and socially constructed, Perfect Trouble confronts conservative arguments that queerness is “unnatural” while also rejecting reductive biological discussions of sexual and gender identity. The exhibition looks at the in-between and overlapping space of nature and nurture to challenge not only the binaries of sexuality and gender but also the boundary that divides the natural world from the constructed environment.   

Drawing from queer ecology and social theory, Perfect Trouble brings together works by artists who employ cultural, embodied and scientific knowledge to illuminate how nature, in fact, holds their lived experiences. In the context of the garden, where plants are grown in controlled environments, Perfect Trouble shows that the natural and human-made, the wild and cultivated, and male/female are binaries that depend on archaic and inadequate classification systems, which fail to acknowledge the expansive variety of life on Earth.

Perfect Trouble: Queering Natureculture is organized by Gabriel de Guzman, Director of Arts and Chief Curator; Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger, Curator of Visual Arts, and Afriti Bankwalla, Curatorial Administrative Assistant.

Spring Arts Opening Day
Sat, April 20, 1:00PM – 4:00PM