the signs appear as in aspic: Kim Neudorf

June 16 - August 13, 2023

Opening Reception: June 16, 2023 from 8-9 pm during ARTcrawl (5:00 pm- 10:00 pm)

Artist Talk: June 23, 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm, Studio One, Cultural Centre FREE

Painting Workshop: June 24, 10:00 am - 2:00 pm, Studio Two, Cultural Centre $95.00

In the signs appear as in aspic, horror-adjacent, cinematic imagery is reimagined as transgressive access to queer and trans embodiment through processes of collage and painting. Alluding to the hapless protagonists in the Daphne Du Maurier gothic novel and 1973 film version of ‘Don’t Look Now’, the exhibition’s title refers to a failure to notice warnings of future events as left by more psychically connected past selves. These warnings are “not threatening to those who cannot read the signs,” but for those who can, the signs appear as “in aspic”[1]. Relating this premise to their own work and life, Neudorf asks: What is needed to be known and seen as a queer and trans subject, what conditions of visibility are necessary in that being knownness, and what tools – built out of necessity and survival – have been left in the present by a self (or selves) from the past?

In the construction of paintings that can take months or even years to complete, Neudorf refers to a highly personal archive of references which shift in and out of use: eyes, arms and hands; scenes, practical effects, and ephemera from horror and horror-adjacent films; past and present transmasculine roots as illegibly legible emotional architecture; these cinematic moments, affects, and visual textures instigate new forms, new holes, new language. Neudorf draws on abstraction and the figural as a way to refuse and complicate the expectation of queer and trans subjectivities as fixed or binary, or as a queering of abstraction, a strategy which is “not limiting or universalizing, but excessive in ways that generate runoffs and alternatives to singular or dualistic categories.”[2] Deliberately clashing, obscuring layers adjust and react to emergent material and painterly dynamics. The process of collage as both precursor and underlying space of tension considers the ways in which visual, affective fragments can retain the power of building an account of oneself by using/perverting the limits of available language. Temporarily anchoring the signs in aspic, or psychic life of an internal logic of self, these blurry, unreliable narratives and temporalities gesture towards resistant materialities that are on the threshold of meaning.

[1] Marsha Kinder and Beverle Houston. “Seeing Is Believing: The Exorcist and Don’t Look Now”, Studies in the Horror Film – The Exorcist (Centipede Press: Lakewood, Colorado, 2011), 158.

[2] Lancaster, Lex Morgan. Dragging Away – Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art (Duke University Press: Durham, NC, 2022), 13.