Neis’s exhibition, “KIN: Us and Our Kinds” assembles a menagerie of queer beings who dwell outside of normative gender and species categories. Across painting, drawing, and print, images of rogue zoology and extravagant gender congregate and commune. “KIN” engages ancient texts and comics, as well as a love for process and mark-making, and a disregard for the putative boundaries between abstraction and figuration.
Vetter’s photography exhibition, “Love is Not the Last Room” is made in collaboration with the artist’s family—their parents, their brothers, and their partner. It is an examination of play and leisure, tension and freedom. Through photographs, Vetter processes how they learned to relate in their most intimate connections, and how they relate now. This project explores queer familial relationships, and uses Vetter’s own gender fluidity as a lens to examine the gendered experiences of their family members.
“Still now, but especially in 2019, there was a lot of pressure on any photographer with a marginalized identity to make their work about that identity in a way that was easily readable to people who are not of that group. I realized that this was something that not only was I not interested in, but I was also not good at. The photos where I picked up my camera to make a photo about my gender queerness ended up being some of my weakest work, so I ended up just using the camera as a way to watch myself, to explore my body, to explore how it felt, and to use the camera a a way to engage with my own dysphoria,” said Vetter during their lecture on September 17.
Neis and Vetter’s exhibits were on display on view from September 17 - December 6, 2024.
The fall exhibits are presented with support from the Department of Women's & Gender Studies, the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, and the CEW+ Frances and Sydney Lewis Visiting Leaders Fund.
