This paper is an exploration of Malcolm Peacocks exhibition Invisible Mxn, as well as, a personal account of the author’s reception as an experienced sex worker, artist, and educator. Invisible Mxn was presented in the Spring of 2019 at Rutgers University Paul Robeson Gallery. Peacock fabricated a three-room installation and recreated an underground sex club within an academic gallery space. The exhibition was composed of popular culture references, handmade objects and images, and physical spaces as a form of coded representation. The visual code of popular culture in Invisible Mxn drew upon sexual iconography, racial and gender performance, and sexuality through figures like Kelly Rowland and Beyoncé, as well as toying with kitschy objects such as a dollar store inflatable raft and ten-foot inflatable pool. The concept of Peacocks exhibition complicated the institutional context and was anti-thesis to the status quo- a challenge to the very function of the popular culture reverences Peacock employed.
Critical to this visual dialogue in Invisible Mxn was the representation of bodily and sexual autonomy. The popular culture references presented both the pain of exclusion and the vulnerability of the black queer youth alongside a rich cultural fabric found in pop culture which strengthened and bonded folks through mutual enjoyment and intimacy. First, this paper provides a perspective understanding of the author’s relationship with consensual and underground sex environments. Second, the author offers an art critical review of the visual content found in the three fabricated spaces. She then connects her lived experience to the content of Peacock’s exhibition. This analysis is grounded in queer, feminist, and critical race theory. Throughout the essay the author shifts from first-person prose to distanced academic analysis. This stylistic method reflects the complex milieu of subversion and conformity required of folks that coexist in both underground lifestyles institutional spaces.
About the presenterKristina Bivona
Kristina Bivona has worked with her hands since childhood and has applied her body in a variety of ways, including but not limited to: pro-domme-work, college, riding freight, squatting, mothering, politics, and art. Through language, text and materials, she manipulates issues of sex-work, feminism, modernism, activism and counterculture. Her art and writing are forms of resistance which expose and break down obstacles created by harmful social norms.