2025 SPE Annual Conference: Adaptations
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print this pageWhipping-It-Up: Collaborative Alchemy
Imagemaker: Garth Amundson and Pierre Gour
Friday, September 13 - 4:00PM to 4:45PM
ELIF 305
Garth and Pierre have been working side-by-side on topics ranging from queer domestic motifs to immigration and identity politics. In their studio practice, the most significant considerations continue to be gender, hegemony, and process— each is equally significant in the way the work is constructed. Metaphorically, they seek to expose ideas that investigate issues of identification, classification, and categorization. As a bi-national, queer, collaborative team, they use their experience as a point of departure. Their presentation will address several continuous bodies of work, as well as a new project, which will be presented in Ho Chi Minh City in October 2019.
As artists and teachers, Garth and Pierre feel that it is their responsibility to continually pose questions regarding diversity in all its forms; specifically, LGBTQ+ issues relate to their professional existence at Western Washington University, and directly correlate with their artistic practice. Their collaborative work is informed by their own experience, and as the first Queer Dual Career couple realized in the Western Washington University Department of Art (2013), they take their responsibilities as role models, advocates, and promoters of social justice very seriously. As OUT faculty who have been together for 32 years, they have engaged in issues of social justice throughout their private and professional lives. From exhibiting in thematic exhibitions such as Queer Me at The LGBTQ Center in NYC, Random Acts at the RoundHouse Gallery Art invitational exhibition in conjunction with the Pride Festival in Vancouver, BC, to presenting their research at conferences such as the SPE National Conference "Save Their Children! That Sweet, Sweet Pie in Anita Bryant's Face" in Orlando, FL, SPE LGBTQ Caucus Presenter, "Queer Collaboration Mentoring" in Las Vegas, NV.
The content of their work is driven by an autobiographical impulse to document their own existence and use it as a point of departure for their creative projects. They identify themselves as part of a larger community of artists who use art as a vehicle to address issues of social justice. As noted in a recent article by Amy Pleasant of the Huffington Post regarding the exhibition Social Change: It Happens to One, It Happens to All, "Art mirrors the aesthetic standard of the day and also provides a window into the historical context of the time. Works such as Andy Warhol's Big Electric Chair or Picasso's Guernica serve as iconic reminders and powerful statements on social issues of their time. Artists often see their place to provoke, to voice, to enlighten... 'Human rights can no longer be thought of as separate and belonging to a privileged few, but rather that these rights are all interrelated, interdependent and indivisible for all.'"
Citing their own struggles and political challenges to inform their work, Garth and Pierre see art as an agent of social change that insists on embracing the notion of pluralism not only as a reality, but as a necessity.
speakers
Garth Amundson
Pierre Gour
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