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a few photos from a recent picturesque stroll around Prospect Park

Photos and text from Unrestrooms, an unfinished survey of gender and public space are now up at badlittlebrother.com/unrestrooms! More photos, exhibition text, and a digital catalog to come!

“Simple Made-Up Machines,” my proposal with Bad Little Brother and Peggy Noland, received an honorable mention from Materials & Applications for their 2019 Open Call, “Staging Construction”! See our proposal here: https://badlittlebrother.com/Simple-Made-Up-Machines

Walt and Bennet’s first kiss, from The Carrie Diaries

entourage for “Garden Things Make Excesses,” Spring 2017

The whole Carrie Diaries crew. I wanted teenagers to populate the garden of “Garden Things Make Excesses.” Spring 2017

call to contribute to an exhibition on public restrooms, design and gender

by Bad Little Brother

Gender is done in the bathroom.

Public restrooms are sites of personal and political transformation. Restrooms are architectural spaces complicit in the formation of a political subject.

Bad Little Brother Collective calls for entries to the upcoming exhibition Unrestrooms. We seek proposals and research by design students and emerging designers that address the agency of architecture in the creation of queer, gender non-conforming, trans, nonbinary, and gendered subjectivities. We believe that equitable access to restrooms ensures visibility and full participation in democratic society, and insist that public restrooms remain in the public realm. We revel in the contradictions of the public restroom, the site where gender is done daily (and done in semi-privacy, in public). We call for projects that creatively, exuberantly, subversively transform the bathroom as a site of gender normativity into a site of multiplying gender variances: design proposals that address the poetics of toilets as much as their politics.

Gender is undone in the bathroom.

We reject a masculinist aspiration to body-transcendence that invalidates the bodily needs of queers, femmes, and people with disabilities in public space, and instead call for public restrooms to make space for bodily rest. We celebrate public restrooms as sites of realized and potential unrest: public sites with the resources for individual and collective resistance, expression, and coalition-building. We believe restrooms can catalyze equitable design, queerly modelling new types of flexible, kind, liminal spaces that emphasize the continuity of human bodies with the more-than-human world, and the necessity of caring for individual bodies in the public realm.

Submit through this link.

Unrestrooms opens at Front/Space in March 2018. Questions? blbcollective [at] gmail [dot] com. Learn more about Bad Little Brother here.

#exhibitions #design #architecture #public restrooms #public space #queer theory

Yesterday, I presented my paper “‘Altering the landscape a little bit’: Queer space-making in Collier Schorr’s Blumen,” to the other participants of the Graduate Workshop in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks.

It was an invigorating conversation. My colleagues at Dumbarton Oaks have been amazing. Through this workshop, we’ve had rigorous and exciting conversations bridging design, art history, history of sciences, and anthropology. This workshop has made the space for those conversations to happen, and I’m inspired to continue them after we disperse.

If you aren’t familiar with Collier Schorr’s Blumen photographs, see a selection here at 303 Gallery.

Updated conceptual section shows “garden things,” visiting teens, and a train passing by all contributing to a distinctive boundary layer.

Can we understand the sectional figure of the boundary layer as an organizing element in the garden?

from “Garden Things Make Excesses,” contemporary follies for an industrial garden, in Julie Bargmann’s “Opinionated Gardens” studio, UVa, Spring 2017.

Conceptual section shows an intimate moment under an overpass, framed by shrubs “corseted” by perforated aluminum walls. “Garden things,” contemporary follies, inspire imitation. I imitate a stiff pylon by leaning against it; I imitate a leaning shrub by leaning away from it.

Extruded polystyrene blocks, the phony “bedrock” of a newly-mounding ground plane, are momentarily exposed as a stepped “outcropping.”

from “Garden Things Make Excesses,” contemporary follies for an industrial garden, in Julie Bargmann’s “Opinionated Gardens” studio, UVa, Spring 2017.