In Not Touching // 2017-2018

The work that makes up In Not Touching includes work in drawing, video installation, and sculpture, and include pieces exhibited at Open Fracture: Catalina Ouyang and Benjamin Rosenthal and Against the Screen. The body of work looks towards the evolving nature of queer sexuality—mediated through technology—as site for theorizing a new kind of queer “technosexuality” and gaze. Challenging the supremacy of human body-to-body contact by exploring the role that a hybrid human-object-virtual encounter might pose for alternative forms of intimacy and contact, this multidisciplinary visual art project speaks directly to important and contemporary conversations around the dissolution of queer spaces, the role emerging and existing technology plays in redefining our queer interactions, and how the changing nature of human identity in relation to technology has unique ramifications for LGBTQIA+ communities.

Objects like amidst the freshness of flesh on the edge of the divine, twice pressed and two strangers meet in a leather bar, notwithstanding (both 2017), suggest contact, fetish, the body and sensual violence without explicit images or directives. Whereas Of Techno-Gods and Sentient Signals #1 and Of Techno-Gods and Sentient Signals #2 both use explicit acts of touching in their treatment of idealized and fragmented virtual bodies—becoming sites to explore encounters power, violation and desire.