Queer Sites and Sounds:

CA+T Launches New Virtual Exhibition and Commissioned Work by Jeffrey Songco

The Center for Art and Thought (CA+T) announces the launch of a new multi-platform virtual exhibition Queer Sites and Sounds and original commissioned art by multi-media artist Jeffrey Songco. The online exhibition began January 14 and will unfold in stages over the next two months on CA+T's website (centerforartandthought.org/work/project/queer-sites-and-sounds) and social media platforms.

Queer Sites and Sounds utilizes CA+T's robust web presence to explore queer digital culture through the lens of Filipino experience and expression. The exhibition broadly defines "queer" to include non-heteronormative genders and sexualities in both Filipino and Western contexts (e.g. LGBTQ, bakla, tomboy) as well as performativity and aesthetics (e.g.  "kitsch," "spectacle," and "camp") that challenge how Filipino bodies, affects, and processes are conventionally understood. According to exhibition curator and CA+T Curatorial Director Jan Christian Bernabe, the digital artwork, videos, audio recordings, scholarship, and writing featured in the exhibition "question the ways that we think of 'queer' as an embodied identity and 'queer' as it relates to narrative and digital forms and digital literacies." Contributors include established and emerging artists, writers, and scholars from around the world, such as Eliza Barrios, Gina Osterloh, Jan Padios, Kiam Marcelo Junio, Kat Larson, Laurel Fantauzzo, Ronaldo Wilson, Miguel Libarnes, and more.

The Queer Sites and Sounds exhibition on CA+T's website premieres alongside CA+T's ongoing, related social media projects. Queer Filipino Selfies on Pinterest (www.pinterest.com/artandthought/queer-filipino-selfies) invites Filipino lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, queers, genderqueers, drag queens, baklas, tomboys, and other non-normative-identifying Filipinos from around the world to submit a "selfie" to pin on CA+T's Queer Filipino Selfies Pinterest board to help create a visual online scrapbook that captures the diversity of queer-identified Filipinos throughout the diaspora. On Tumblr, the mini-exhibition CA+T "Reblogs" Queer Filipino Viral Hit (centerforartandthought.tumblr.com) showcases “viral” digital videos, images, and memes that feature "queer" Filipino bodies and moments. This reblogging exhibition illustrates how new media and digital outlets provide queer Filipinos and others new platforms for visibility, engagement, and critique.

CA+T also commissioned San Francisco-based multi-media artist Jeffrey Songco to create an original work for Queer Sites and Sounds (centerforartandthought.org/work/project/new-works). Songco’s new digital print Confessional is the third iteration in a series of photographic prints depicting his recurring "bag head" character. Songco says that Confessional comes out of his ongoing fascination with the phenomenon of the American reality show "confessional" and how it works to illuminate (white) American identity and mores. In February, limited edition digital prints of Songco's Confessional will be available for purchase on CA+T's website (centerforartandthought.org/publications).

Taken together, the various components of Queer Sites and Sounds explore the possibilities of queer engagement across multiple virtual spaces and showcase queer expressive practices that dare us to look, read, and reflect.