LAST NIGHT
HOT•BED | MICRO•GALLERY
Dana Buzzee, Lucas LaRochelle, Joseph Liatela, and Ryan Rudewicz
OPENING July 9, 2022 - CLOSING August 27, 2022
HOT•BED’s MICRO•GALLERY is pleased to present LAST NIGHT, a four-person show featuring works by Dana Buzzee, Lucas LaRochelle, Joseph Liatela, and Ryan Rudewicz. The exhibition will be on view from July 9 - August 27, with an opening reception on July 9, 2022 at 6 PM.
Gay is an identity of longing, and there is a wistfulness to beholding it in the form of a building, like how the sight of a theater stirs the imagination
-Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out
Memory, hope, utopia, longing: these are the central themes of LAST NIGHT. Looking back as a way of looking forward, the works in this show—like the people they celebrate—engage the past as a lens through which we might envision a better future. They illustrate the value of making permanent the impermanent moments of community realized in gay bars, cabarets, sex dungeons, park corners, and other sites of queer intimacy. The title of this show, LAST NIGHT, refers to a set past (“remember what we did last night?”) as well as an uncertain future (“let’s live like it’s our last night on earth!”), alluding to the precarity of radical queerness in a heterosexual society.
In light of recent years’ events, questions about the value of queer spaces and placemaking traditions have returned to the front of many peoples’ minds. What does it mean to cultivate a “queer space”? How do queer folk assert their bodily autonomy in a world that prioritizes heterosexuality? Is there such thing as “queer place”? LAST NIGHT assembles the work of four artists—Dana Buzzee, Lucas LaRochelle, Joseph Liatela, and Ryan Rudewicz—whose practices celebrate the various ways queer communities carve out a place for themselves in the world.
LAST NIGHT features work produced in the aftermath of 2020, a pivotal year of global loss and learning, that highlights the effervescence and precarity of queer place. Buzzee’s otherworldly sculptures revel in the aesthetics of bondage and witchcraft, their iridescence and transparency reminding viewers of life’s fleeting nature. LaRochelle’s QT.bot series unsticks itself from time through its automated mining of text and images from their crowdsourced Queering the Map, reaching backwards in recent queer history to point towards a more hopeful future. Liatela’s videography and prints explore themes of superimposition, ghostly presence, and bittersweet memory to remind viewers that queerness in the wrong hands is not always a positive thing. Lastly, Rudewicz’s iconic Polaroid photographs capture the euphoria of New York queer nightlife and its resonances beyond the nighttime hours.
-Liam Maher
Curator, LAST NIGHT
About MICRO•GALLERY
MICRO•GALLERY is an experimental exhibition space located on the second floor of HOT•BED that is devoted to immersive artistic endeavors. Primed for transformation, MICRO•GALLERY acts as a blank space; a no-limits playground for guest curators and artists to produce and exhibit innovative work. Acting as an extension of gallery programming, the small nature and intimacy of the space allows for a concentrated dose of risks, deviations and opportunities. MICRO•GALLERY accepts proposals from leading curators, artists and collectives on a rolling basis.