Kameron Neal: HotHouse

How do we relate to the precarity, politics, and potential for comfort and joy of intentional queer spaces? What is our role in remembering and recording those spaces once they’re gone, and what might we owe to the particular queer histories of the spaces we occupy? 

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HotHouse is an ongoing curatorial project exploring current queer creators' relationships to queer history, space, and memory. The project's inaugural exhibition, HotHouse: Kameron Neal, was presented at Young Curators, New Ideas V at Detroit Art Week 2019. The project's second iteration is I'll Take You There, a solo presentation of works by artist Gary Cruz at The Olympia Project in Bushwick, NY, January 10 - March 10 2020. For further details on HotHouse read more here. 

 

At HotHouse Kameron Neal exhibited site-specific video installations exploring the ways in which we encode our history and use technology to craft compelling performances of self. Kameron maps the peculiar intelligences of queer, colored, and abject bodies through kinetic environments of stop-action photography, glitch, live video, and bodily fluids that serve as arenas for him to learn how to touch and be touched.

 

This first solo presentation of Kameron’s work explores two parallel and connected histories.The first, three years of Kameron’s creative output, an intimate, vulnerable examination of sense of self, queer Black identity, control, and attraction. The second, a regional history of queer creative placemaking:  throughout the 1990s, self-taught artist Scott Swoveland painted over 500 unrepentantly queer murals on the windows of Houston bar Mary’s, an action of confident communal ownership and political protest. Kameron’s autobiographical explorations are here contextualized by Swoveland’s story and broader questions of queer spaces, their relation to race, legacy, and cycles of regeneration, erasure and violence.

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The project draws inspiration and context from one queer history in Houston, but understands it as one of many valuable stories across the U.S, at risk of loss. As we acknowledge Stonewall's 50th anniversary, we seek new methods of commemorating and archiving regional instances of queer resistance that can provide fresh contexts for current LGBTQ artists and narratives. Read the full press release here. Check out the project in Forbes and Hypebeast.

Detroit Art Week (July 17 – 21, 2019) is an annual citywide celebration of contemporary art in Detroit. Organized by Aleiya Lindsey and Amani Olu of Olu & Company, Young Curators, New Ideas V took place from Wednesday, July 17 to Sunday, July 21, 2019 at Trumbull & Porter Hotel Detroit. Participating curators included Isabella Achenbach, Marian Casey, Luna Goldberg, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Rosie Motley, Gina Mudge, Vera Petukhova, Sophie Olympia Riese, Kasia Sobucka, Nadia Tahoun, Darryl DeAngelo Terrell and Yulia Topchiy.

YCNI V shines a light on the cultural, artistic, social and political transformations initiated by the creative and curatorial practices by those identifying as, woman, Black, POC, LGBTQ+ and gender-nonconforming. With a sense of urgency and relevancy, each multifaceted micro-exhibition transformed a 256 square-foot hotel room into an immersive installation, fostering provocative discussions on the most pressing issues of our time.

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All images below courtesy Kameron Neal unless otherwise noted.