Picture Day (Queer Toxicities and Plastic Futures)

September 23

A solo exhibition by Brendhan Garland

Curated by Kayla Burnett

The work in Brendhan Garland Picture Day (Queer Toxicities and Plastic Futures) is a reflection on my own identity as a white, queer person in America – using plastic as a conceptual framework. In addition to being, literally, part plastic (due to the increase of microplastics in our air and water), using plastic as a medium and conceptual framework allows me to draw parallels between myself and the plastic – as both queer objects/subjects and the direct results of settler colonialism and imperialism. By embodying both of these identities and attempting to grapple with the inherent contradictions, connections, and complications between them I am neither positioning myself in a hopeful or an apocalyptic future narrative. This allows “the plasticity of plastic matter [to be] framed, not in the binary terms of positive and negative, but in the complicated enmeshments of lively being in and through toxicity. And instead of completely balking in horror, retreating to eco(hetero)normativity, or seeking the refuge of perfectly contained apocalyptic narratives, might there be a way to live with this toxicity, coupled with its ‘despairing, painful, screamingly negative affects,’ as Chen has described them? Might there be something interesting and productive in a future where sex and gender increasingly morph, and where reproduction slows? In fact, might the proliferation of queer toxicities provide new avenues of biological proliferation? For, as Bagemihl writes, ‘the capacity for behavioral plasticity – including homosexuality – may strengthen the ability of a species to respond ‘creatively’ to a highly changeable and ‘unpredictable’ world’ (1999, 251)” (Davis 2022, 99).” 

Brendhan Garland is a second year MFA candidate at the University of Florida in the Sculpture department, and they received their BA from Illinois College.