By Zackary Drucker and Amos Mac
It’s been almost a year since Zackary Drucker and I made these images in Syracuse, NY. In August, I released Translady Fanzine, featuring select images from our collaboration, as well as letters we wrote to each other and Zackary’s own story. This is the first time the images will be presented in a gallery. If you’re in the Los Angeles area, I hope to see you there! Don’t forget the special ZACKARY DRUCKER doormat available, limited edition.
“Distance is where the heart is, home is where you hang your heart”
New Photographs by ZACKARY DRUCKER & AMOS MAC
December 10, 2011 – January 15, 2012
Artists Reception: Saturday, December 10, 2011, 6-9 PM
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is thrilled to announce an exhibition of new photographs by ZACKARY DRUCKER and AMOS MAC, titled “Distance is where the heart is, home is where you hang your heart”, opening Saturday, December 10, 2011, through January 15, 2012. An artist’s reception will be held on Saturday, December 10th, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m.
“Distance is where the heart is, home is where you hang your heart” is an intimate collaboration between two near-strangers—Zackary Drucker, the LA-based photographer, video and performance artist, and Amos Mac—the creator and publisher of Original Plumbing. Executed over a long, snowed-in Christmas weekend at Drucker’s childhood home in Syracuse, New York, the images combine elements of personal history, performance documentation, and exhibitionism. The resulting intervention is also an experiment in cross-identity representation; a dialogue between Mac, a trans man, and Drucker, a trans woman. The exhibition marks the official release of this unique suite of 25 limited-edition photographs, a number of which appear in the first issue of Mac’s new publication, Translady Fanzine.
Keeping normative culture on the periphery, “Distance is where the heart is, home is where you hang your heart” explores the relationship between spectacle and voyeur as uniquely removed from the trappings of representational asymmetry. Veering between classically sleek fashion editorials to the sexed-up fetishism of Pierre Molinere, the site-specific body works of Ana Mendieta, and the transgressive body-as-target performances of Chris Burden, the photo essay imagines a stratagem where difference is grated into a fine dust settling over the ruins of normativity. Devoid of traditional male-female power dynamics, Mac and Drucker’s mutual bond and kinship as trans people results in a visual free-for-all that plays with sexuality, female subjection, power, wealth, vulnerability, victimization, family, comfort, safety, secrets—a perfect balance of voyeur and aesthete.
Drawing from feminist and queer theoretical discourse, Zackary Drucker’s work addresses sexual exploitation, transgender representation, and drag performance in order to explore relationships that facilitate queer/counter-cultural lineage. Interested in obliterating language obstacles, pulverizing identity disorders and revealing dark subconscious layers of outsider agency, her work reinvents and redistributes traditionally-held binary formulas and power relationships between spectacle and voyeur, dominator and subjugated, and the domesticated and exoticized.
Zackary Drucker earned an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2007 and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2005. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in venues including the 54th Venice Biennale (Swiss Off-Site Pavilion); Curtat Tunnel, Lausanne, Switzerland; L.u.c.c.a. Museum of Contemporary Art, Lucca, IT; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; REDCAT and LACE, Los Angeles; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Deitch Projects and Leo Koenig Inc. Projekte, New York; Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles; and Jerome Zodo, Milan; among others.
Amos Mac is the creator, editor in chief, photographer and publisher of Original Plumbing, a celebrated female-to-male trans quarterly that was named Best Zine of 2010 in the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s yearly readers’ poll. Mac’s voyeuristic, snap-shot styled photographs have been exhibited at galleries and events internationally, and his work has been published extensively in magazines, books, newspapers, and ad campaigns. Amos Mac holds a BS in Liberal Arts from The New School in New York City, where he lives and works.
For further information, please call 310-838-6000 or email gallery@luisdejesus.com.
