From pop culture to corporal humor, Nayland Blake’s exhibition No Wrong Holes, currently on display at LA’s Institute of Contemporary Art, plays with intimacy from every angle. Pieces like Starting Over (2000), which features Blake in a 147 lb bunny suit tap dancing to Michael Jackson, put Blake's body and its capacities on display to consider cultural belonging. Engaging with their own White passing, Blake interrogates how the bonds of culture are both formed and broken along the fault line of cultural expectation.
Blake’s consistent use of kitsch icons like Bugs Bunny asks what kind of intimacy pop culture gives us; How do recognizable figures stand in as avatars for human expression and escapism? Blake also evokes pop culture to interrogate cultural bias, pointing to the racial and homophobic stereotypes that Br’er Rabbit—originally an African folk tale—and Bugs Bunny are imbued with.
In a number of pieces, Blake cultivates historical closeness. Through works like Magic (1990) and Joe Dallesandro as Augustin (1994), Blake serves as a kind of queer biographer, archiving the contributions of overlooked queer icons such as Wayland Flowers, Hans Bellmer, and Ethyl Eichelberger. Blake's 30-year engagement with the HIV/AIDS crisis speaks to the closeness that tragedy brings.
The exhibition ends with a focus on Blake's current community-based practice. This work is aptly paired with Bay Area artist Sadie Barnette’s iridescent and arresting installation piece The New Eagle Creek Saloon, a replica of the first black-owned queer bar in San Francisco, founded by her father.
No Wrong Holes "Thirty Years of Nayland Blake" will be on view at ICA LA until January 26, 2020. text by Rosa Boshier, photographs by Oliver Kupper
