Feature: Elizabeth Friedlander

16/02/18
Feature: Elizabeth Friedlander

Published in the winter 2017 issue of Art Quarterly

Review of Queer British Art 1861-1967 at Tate Britain

24/04/17

Queer British Art 1861-1967

Tate Britain, London
5 April – 1 October 2017

“For me, to use the word ‘queer’ is a liberation; it was a word that frightened me, but no longer” – Derek Jarman

In a year when nearly all of London’s – nay, Britain’s – major (and even lesser) museums and galleries are putting on LGBTQI* related exhibitions to mark the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of sex between men in 1967, Tate Britain’s Queer British Art 1861-1967 is the biggest and boldest of the lot. What could have – and was being feared by many would – become an androcentric, homoerotic romp, is a well-curated, historically informative and aesthetically compelling exploration of the multifaceted interpretations of “queerness” in the century leading up to this milestone.

The self-declared remit of the exhibition’s curators is to explore “a wide range of sexualities and gender identities” – hence the choice of the word “queer”, rather than any combination of letters and asterisks, also influenced by the fact that, with ever-changing labels, many of those that we use today would not have been used, or recognised, by the artists and audiences in their own times. The starting point of the show – 1861 – was selected because it was the year the death penalty for sodomy was abolished (although it was still punishable by imprisonment) and the decades are traversed chronologically, thematically, and through the representation of artistic groups, such as the pre-Raphaelites and – synonymous with fluid sexuality – the Bloomsbury Group.

Read the full review here

Review of Jamie Crewe: Female Executioner at Gasworks, London

01/02/17

Jamie Crewe: Female Executioner

Gasworks, London

26 January – 26 March 2017

We all look for others like us whom we can look up to, be they a celebrity, or a historical or literary figure. Being slightly behind the Brookside Beth generation of young lesbians, I found myself clinging to moments shared between Shannon and Mandy in Home and Away; somehow excruciatingly sitting through the Ellen (DeGeneres) coming out episode with both my parents (and my father never watches mainstream television); and wallowing in the tragedy of Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness, when I discovered (and, if I remember correctly, unauthorisedly borrowed) a copy in the school library. Agonising as it was, this story became personal, offering me context, affirmation and companionship. Recently, I was on a panel with the trans artist, Simon Croft, and the trans activist and academic, Natacha Kennedy, looking at the story of the Chevalier d’Éon, an 18th-century French diplomat, spy and soldier, who lived life variously as a man and a woman, considering the inherent problems with re-interpreting this history now, achronologically, as a transgender one, when this term did not come into being until the final-third of the 20th century. It is this problem of what happens “when a queer, transfeminine artist tries to touch, reflect on, or rehabilitate a historical work of fiction that seems to offer them ancestry”, that Jamie Crewe (b1987) tackles head on in their exhibition, Female Executioner, at Gasworks, commissioned through the Freelands Artist Programme.

Read the full review here

Interview with Sarah Jane Moon

17/04/15

Interview: Sarah Jane Moon 

Inside Portraits

Mall Galleries Learning Centre, London

16 – 19 April 2015

For Sarah Jane Moon, painting is “fundamentally the relationship between an artist’s senses and the subject’s presence.” Having trained in portrait painting at Heatherley School of Fine Art (2009-2011), Moon went on to receive commendations from both the Royal British Society of Sculptors and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, from whom she was awarded the 2013 Bulldog Bursary.

Moon works primarily with oil on canvas and builds up layers, often painting objects in and out of the composition. She is keen to show her friends’ and sitters’ characters through both a visual likeness but also by the careful placement of objects that define them, such as books and postcards. Having spent some time in Japan, her work has a strong graphic element to it and she outlines her figures in black and flattens perspective, usually working from a photograph.

Her most recent work is her largest yet and depicts a dinner party with many of her friends crowded around the table, chatting and convivial. Above them hangs a stark black and white portrait of the lesbian author, Radclyffe Hall.

To watch this interview, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/sarah-jane-moon-inside-portraits-mall-galleries-bulldog-bursary