The second weekend of Jordan Crandall's exhibition "Showing" brings Mimi Nguyen from Chicago and John Paul Ricco from Toronto, along with a selection of videos curated by Robert Summers called "Showing Shame: Shameless Showing." Mimi's talk focuses on the circuit between star and fan, using the work of JJ Chinois; John will give a performance with Eleanor Kaufman and then a theoretical presentation about the event of mutually shared exposure between bodies.

Please visit the online catalog for "Showing" at http://www.telic.info/catalogs/showing for more information and an upcoming schedule.

Saturday, 9/22
Noon - 4pm
"Showing Shame: Shameless Showing" screening program curated by Robert Summers (see description below)
4pm
JJ Chinois music video and selections by Mimi Nguyen
5pm
Presentation by Mimi Nguyen (see description below)
7pm
Performance by Eleanor Kaufman and John Paul Ricco
Presentation by John Paul Ricco (see description below)

On Friday, September 21, a screening program called "Identity Masquerades" will run during the normal gallery hours of 12-6pm, including clips from Busby Berkeley, Gold Diggers of 1933 and 42nd St (1933); Kenneth Anger, Puce Moment (1949) and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965); Alan Calpe, Perfidia (2006); Jack Smith, Flaming Creatures (1963); and Paul Morrissey/Andy Warhol, Flesh (1968).

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SHOWING SHAME: SHAMELESS SHOWING
curated by Robert Summers
Artists/Videos:
Lee Adams, Porca Miseria (2007)
Hoang Tan Nguyen, Forever Bottom (1999)
Vaginal Davis & Billy MIller, Tom Cruise Loves Women (2005)
SUPERM (Slava Mogutin & Brian Kenny), "TBA" (2007)
(New video by SUPERM will be its US premiere)

The selected videos show various enactments of the artists and/or their friends performing themselves in acts of shame. With regard to "queer" subjectivity and shame, I draw on the work of Eve Sedgwick who argues that shame can be understood in relation to "queer" - as she pointedly states, "queer" is a term that "might usefully be thought of as referring in the first place to [persons who are tied to shame] ... those whose sense of identity is for some reason tuned most durably to the note of shame". But, I argue that even though there is shame there is also the shameless, it is never far behind, which I think is important to examine in relation to "queer/-ness" - which would push Sedgwick's argument. Indeed, I see no reason to disconnect shame from shameless - after all they are but a suffix apart. All in all, I hope these films show something valuable: I hope they show something shame/less.

MIMI NGUYEN's presentation will focus on technologies of the self and of the star (assembling a desirable commodity body), using the work of JJ Chinois - the transgendered persona of artist Lynne Chan. As an aspirant to celebrity, JJ Chinois critiques and appropriates the pleasures of pop stardom in global culture in the early 21st century and does so by sexing up Bruce Lee's star image in ways that we haven't seen before. Overall Nguyen's presentation will explore the circuits between star and fan, and issues of performance, embodiment, and identity.

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Previously, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Rackham School of Graduate Studies and Assistant Professor in Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She earned her PhD. in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is currently completing her first book, Representing Refugees, which examines the historical production and mobilization of refugee affect for varied political and cultural projects (such as commemoration, humanitarianism, consumption and multicultural nationalism).

She continues to situate her work within transnational feminist cultural studies with her next project, focusing on fashion, citizenship and transnationality. She is co-editor with Thuy Linh Tu of Alien Encounters: Pop Culture in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2007) and author of multiple essays on Asian American, queer, and punk subcultures, digital technologies, and Vietnamese diasporic culture, published in academic collections, on-line publications and popular magazines.

JOHN PAUL RICCO's presentation will draw from Jean-Luc Nancy, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, and Leo Bersani, to focus on "the event of mutually-shared exposure": the separating-connecting spacing that exists between, amongst, and around any one or more bodies, in varying degrees of intimacy or closeness. He will look at the ethical and political questions this provokes, involving social bonds formulated through a "non-identitarian narcissism": a space, cutting transversally across the circuit of voyeurism and exhibitionism, in which one performs neither solely for oneself nor for some objectified other, but for any number of other ones in the virtual-corporeal networks of distance and connection.

John Paul Ricco is a theorist, curator and performance artist, and is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art, Media Theory, and Criticism at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. He is the author of The Logic of the Lure, and a number of essays on contemporary artists. Currently, he is organizing a three-part exhibition of contemporary queer video, to open at V-Tape in Toronto in January 2008, and working on his next book: The Decision Between Us: aporetic aesthetics and the unbecoming community. For "Showing," Ricco is premiering a body-based performance installation and artist talk, on narcissism and the space of bare naked exposure.
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