Luis Carle, Portraits of Queer/Puerto Rican Artists, Street Performers and Activists, Drag March, Pride Weekend, 2020, digital print, Courtesy of the artist.
Artists
About
This exhibition presents the work of New York Puerto Rican photographer Luis Carle. In his over 30-year career, Carle has dedicated himself to documenting the ways queer/Puerto Rican diasporic subjects recreate themselves and their surroundings in everyday life through extravagant gestures and performances that both transform them and their relationship to space. Following on Puerto Rican critic and performer Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes’s theories about drag and trans performance, we call this ability to transform self and space through gestures and performances translocality. Taken as a whole, the exhibition narrates the arc of Carle’s artistic vision from his exploration of queer nightlife as a response to the devastation of AIDS to his affirmation of migration, mutability and translocality as creatively performative responses to loss in everyday life. It spans from the materiality of the nightlife party to the evanescence of the artist’s craft as a hopeful, continually mutating art that is often caught, as it were, in the middle of a storm and always in transition or in flight.
