Student Art Exhibition opens March 19
Prescribed Assimilation a HARD pill to swallow
MA Exhibition by Luke Blevins at the UMKC Gallery of Art
March 19th– April 18th, 2020
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 19, 5-7 pm
Prescribed Assimilation explores the tangential relationships between boyhood, social expectations, queer culture, heteronormative assimilationism, and nostalgia. Blevins uses nostalgia as a sense of self-identity to reference and recontextualize the past through his personal lens. Nostalgia lends itself to fantasy as our memories are unreliable; we create gilded moments to revisit as escapism.
Looking back on his childhood, Blevins see the gaps between nostalgic memories and the events that shaped him. It is in these moments that fantasy, and reality intersect. Blevins views these intersections as representing what we perceive and strive for as children and the shifting relationships we have with social structures as adults.
For Blevins, the life he has led is a queer experience that is questioned by himself and society at large. His work explores the question of how he fits into the queer community and the heteronormative state. Blevins states, “as my work grows, my ability to relate to the prescribed notion of the homosexual is stretched thinner and thinner.”
Through digital manipulation and processes, Blevins creates images that propose narratives without conclusions that are snap shots of the in-between. This is achieved via layers of information combined in photoshop; color, shadow, and object work to obscure reality and paint his experience of the world in all its falsity.
Photos become paintings which become photos again. Through shifting and reiterating concepts across mediums, Blevins states, “I make art to better understand how society has shaped me. My work is a question of acceptance, alternatives to assimilation, and how I relate to the world.”