A Hole So Big It Became The Sky
A Hole So Big It Became The Sky
Coco Guzman & Daze Jefferies, with community participation
July 6 – August 3, 2019
Opening Reception: July 6, 7-9pm
What happens when our experiences are Too Big to talk about? When they resist the symbolic register of language? How do we transmit them, how do we hold them? The horrific, and the transcendent. Holes are scattered behind us, as we weave unevenly our collective history.
This exhibition addresses the Too Big by creating collective opportunities to draw from archives, memory, and personal narrative; by plunging us into a dynamic visual and audio installation built around local 2SLGBTQIA+ histories.
Coco Guzman’s painting and drawing practice deftly articulates personal and collective trauma, lacing the mundane and the disturbing together into complex, visually compelling scenes. Daze Jefferies is an artist, poet and trans historian, whose visual and audio practice tracks the voices of trans and queer Newfoundlanders and Labradorians through decades of trauma and transcendence. For A Hole So Big It Became The Sky, Jefferies and Guzman will work with a group of queer-identified St. John’s residents to represent defiant gaps in collective memory. In an immersive mural that spans the gallery walls, they will map the pain and ecstasy of our community. This surreal landscape is submerged in a sea of voices. Scraps of paper pulled from local archives drift on the waves.
In A Hole So Big It Became The Sky, the hole is both an overwhelming void and an object of desire. Here we revisit queer histories, as succulent and immediate as they are contradictory, intangible, unknowable; we bear witness to the intimacies and whispers that can only emanate from curled tongues.