Gag

What is “gag”? Gag moves. Gag is visceral. Gag catches in the throat. A laugh. A retch. A joke. A bind. Pleasure and pain. Both noun and verb, gag provokes strong feelings. And, in the hands of artists, it offers a means of grappling with contemporary experience in a tragicomic mode. GAG proposes a bold new framework for understanding twenty-first-century photography and video. Beginning with the cinematic sight gag and its long history of comic interruption, the project expands to put in play uses of the terms associated with queer ballroom vernacular, judicial gag orders, BDSM and kink, choking and retching, and the dark feedback loops of social media and meme culture. What emerges is a rich conceptual language for work that refuses easy categorization: violent and slapstick, icky and sublime, funny and anxious, all at once. The exhibition features the work of contemporary artists, including Peggy Ahwesh, Lucas Blalock, Patty Chang, Talia Chetrit, Buck Ellison, Martine Gutierrez, Whitney Hubbs, Steffani Jemison, Arnold J. Kemp, Tommy Kha, Tala Madani, Paul Pfeiffer, Pope.L, Josephine Pryde, Torbjørn Rødland, and Erin Calla Watson. Their works are complemented by a selection of historical photographs from the George Eastman Museum collection that propose a lineage of gag(s) evident in sources ranging from vernacular photographs to significant works associated with the Bauhaus, Surrealism, and conceptual art.