Caden Manson: Group show "Make Me Feel Mighty Real" at the Honor Fraser Gallery in LOS ANGELES
If you are in LA make sure to visit the exciting new group show at Honor Fraser Gallery, including the work of transartist Caden Manson. The Honor Fraser Gallery is a contemporary art gallery in Los Angeles presenting alternative perspectives on traditional mediums and emerging technologies.
📆 The show opened on March 3rd and is on until May 27
📬 2622 La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034
Curated by Scott Ewalt and Jamison Edgar
"Make Me Feel Mighty Real" traces the development of avatars within LGBTQ+ creative expression, with a focus on the methods and technologies used by artists to foster community, pursue idealized settings, and embrace diverse hybrid identities both in virtual and real-life contexts.
Caden Manson presents a video install called SOS in the "dark room" with artists Ryan Trecartin and Dynasty Handbag. "Make Me Feel Mighty Real" imbues Honor Fraser with the qualities of a living archive, capturing the essence of glamor, grit, glitch, and gore in a transformation that is both dynamic and enduring.
Installation View, 2023 Image Credit: Jeff McLane
Art Forum Must See “Make Me Feel Mighty Real” tracks the evolution of avatars in queer creative practices, with special attention given to the tools and techniques that artists use to build community, cruise utopia, and enact unruly hybridity online and IRL. The exhibition’s title borrows lyrics from Sylvester’s legendary disco album, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” a melodic monument to uninhibited queer desire and it’s capacity to augment the mind, reconfigure the body, and spawn a new reality into existence.
In turn, “Make Me Feel Mighty Real” serves as the song’s most recent refrain, celebrating a lineage of artists whose resolve to forge their own mixed realities continues to nurture our technological fantasies today.
More information about the event: HERE
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Bigartgroup installation included in the New York Times on February 3rd 2021
Caden Manson is an artist, curator (Contemporary Performance and Special Effects Festival), and educator. Through the company Big Art Group, their performance work creates radical queer narrative structures and embodiments to construct and aid transitory generative critical space for participants and audience. Their work is dense, fast, multi-layered, and traverses multiple genres and forms, often using interference, slippage, and disruption strategies.
PRACTICE STATEMENT
“My research and performances confront queer formlessness, image construction, code, and networked technologies. I use media techniques of interference, slippage, glitch, copy, loop, and disruption while focusing on strategies of the commons, mutual aid, and networked identity. My work is embodied in my company, Big Art Group, as performances, videos, and installations. In my creations, the body is plural and extends beyond the flesh. It takes substance within a matrix of pixels, resonances, avatars, and links. It cannot be held within a constituency of celluloid nor code, nor does it reflect in a mirror. It exists as a construct; vapor and drag without source or original. The body/framework traffics in bandwidth and gestures through frequency and speed.
As an educator, I teach the performance/media techniques that are part of my artistic practice and support strategies for experimentation, communing, and care in the academic institution. I co-curate the annual Special Effects Festival in New York City each year. The festival runs in the East Village for a week centering new forms and the work of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC performance artists.”
Through Big Art Group, their performance work creates radical queer narrative structures and embodiments to construct and aid transitory generative critical space for participants and audience. Employing various media techniques such as interference, slippage, glitch, copy, loop, and disruption, they focus on the strategic implementation of the commons, mutual aid, and networked identity.
More information at: https://bigartgroup.com