PHOSPHORESCENT FOSSILS

Leena Joshi writes and creates visual works that foreground their queer, gender variant, immigrant relationship to the world, examining the ways in which cultural and identity markers are used as sources of both strength and extraction. Through an intermingling of poetry, sculpture, video, and performance, Joshi’s works engage with ideas of identity subterfuge as liberation and resistance to the pressure of mastery of personhood, instead leaning on the notion of the constantly changing person as form of destruction and escape from neoliberal subjectivity and its relationship to surveillance, racial and sexual exclusion, and state control. Ambivalent about participation in the institutionalized art world and all it represents, they recognize the importance of creating one’s image for and against institutional spaces, the tension of absence and presence in the mainstream for so-called “minority” figures, and the transformational possibilities of asserting underground/queer communities outside of vetted education and arts economies.

Janie Stamm was born and raised on the edge of the Everglades in Broward County, Florida. She is a craft-based artist currently residing on the western banks of the Mississippi River in Saint Louis, Missouri. Her work focuses on preserving Florida’s environmental and Queer history in the face of climate change. She uses a craft-based practice to tell these stories. In the spring of 2019, Janie received an MFA in Visual Art from Washington University in Saint Louis. She was most recently the recipient of the 2019 John T. Milliken Foreign Travel Graduate Award, a Regional Arts Commission grant, a Critical Mass grant, a Dubinsky Scholarship to study at the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Frida Kahlo Creative Arts Award from Washington University in St. Louis. Her work was featured on the cover of the December 2016 issue of Poetry magazine and in the spring 2021 issue of CandyFloss Magazine. Janie has shown work throughout the country including Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, and throughout the Saint Louis regional area. She is currently showing at Rivalry Projects in Buffalo, NY. She was an artist in residence at ACRE in Wisconsin, the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, Aquarium Gallery in New Orleans, and SAFTA in Tennessee. Janie is an artist-in-residence at Craft Alliance and a resident teaching artist at the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis. 

Sarita Hernández is an arts educator, oral hxstorian, and print/zine/piemaker from salvadoréxican Califas and currently based in Chicago. Sarita is co-founder of marimacha monarca press, a queer and trans* people of color zine familia based in Chicago’s South Side since 2017. They are interested in artistic interventions with the historical archive and imagining alternative forms of social documentation, preservation, and activation of everyday hxstories, survivals, and resistances. They make queer vegan pies in their DIY @pleasurepies shop, rasquache prints, erotic performances, and sad boi zines.