bradycollings, do i not fill heaven and earth?
Exhibition • Jun 10–Jul 1, 2022
Reception Saturday, June 18, 6–9pm.
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Curated by Caroline Frost
Lubbock-based artist bradycollings translates meditations on domesticity, nostalgia, and voyeurism, as they relate to queerness, into objects and images in do i not fill heaven and earth. In their featured mixed media work, bradycollings uses repetition as a tool to explore anxiety-inducing cyclicality, as well as the comfort that can be derived from such thought patterns. Images are repeated, manipulated, and disfigured, allowed to deviate and distort, as thoughts or memories do, often falling back into line from momentary slippages. The shifting back into place, evidence of such slippage, is further accentuated by the nervous quality of the image-making, out of focus and blurry, existing within a space of uncertainty and apprehension.
do i not fill heaven and earth investigates Home as a concept and the associations attached to it. By appropriating wallpaper patterns, photographs, and other forms related to domestic spaces, bradycollings evokes a feigned nostalgia to explore how these spaces often feel inaccessible to queer people, and the emotional repercussions that arise when a body is born into a space where its inherent design creates opposition to existence. Images used are vernacular in nature, creating the sensation of browsing through a personal photo album.
The featured work also demonstrates bradycollings’ interest in voyeuristic themes. By situating the viewer as a voyeur, the work initiates commentary on how queer people are often perceived through their intimate relationships by default, immediately sexualized by others even if this perception is against the subject’s will or consent. This theme is explored through images of the artist in drag, where the viewer is gazing at a figure often in lingerie or various stages of undress, and by creating home-like sculptures or images that the viewer has to peer around and into to in order to consume the information.
In do i not fill heaven and earth, bradycollings offers their personal thoughts, experiences, and memories as tools for grappling with the experiences and treatment of queer people within spheres that have been constructed for those who do not identify as queer. In doing so, bradycollings reclaims the spaces which have traditionally excluded queerness.
Artist’s Statement
do i not fill heaven and earth considers the deceptive and expansive qualities of memories, thought patterns and their processes, and objects and images in relation to queerness. This body of work demonstrates an interest in how objects and images are carried within oneself, physically, mentally, or metaphorically, and the way time, distance, death, and life experiences can alter and distort objects and images from their original form, function, or meaning. Attempting to grapple with the hoarded visual information associated with my homes and deceased loved ones’ homes, do i not fill heaven and earth is the physical manifestation of my time spent mulling over or ruminating on thoughts and events. I’m considering not only objects, images, and domestic spaces but also how queer bodies exist within them, distort them, and resist them. By utilizing long-time intensive repetition, I am able to attach a physicality to the extended time I’ve spent thinking about these images. Through themes of voyeurism and domesticity, do i not fill heaven and earth explores my complex feelings of comfort and anxiety, clarity and cloudiness, and the desire for the nostalgia and sentimentality that as a queer person has been robbed of me.
About the Artist
bradycollings is an interdisciplinary queer collage artist, painter, and drag queen from the piney woods of East Texas. bradycollings attended undergraduate at the University of North Texas and The University of Texas at Tyler, receiving their BFA in studio art from the latter in December 2020. Currently attending Texas Tech University in pursuit of an M.F.A in painting, bradycollings work focuses on ideas of memory and its expansive and deceptive qualities, and how this intersects with themes of home, family, drag, queerness, and the body. In addition to maintaining a studio art practice, bradycollings performs on cast at Club Luxor in Lubbock, Texas every weekend, utilizing materials from their drag practice within the work. bradycollings has exhibited in juried exhibitions nationwide, as well as various group shows in the East Texas area.