-
SONJA RIEGER: DAZZLING
April 9 - May 22, 2010
Maus Contemporary is excited to announce Sonja Rieger - Dazzling, the artist’s first one-person exhibition with the gallery.
Dazzling is a portrait project that documents an amateur transit circuit. Transit is a self-described term used to define the men/women who are involved in various levels of gender transformation at the pageant. The subjects are primarily African American and the Pageant is held in a rented building converted into a temporary bar in the town of Fairfield, Alabama, a previously white steel town outside of Birmingham, Alabama, whose population is now 90.23% African American.
I met Daryl in 2006. He was a nursing attendant at St. Martin’s in the Pines, an Episcopal nursing home that my mother had moved to after a massive stroke. Daryl is 6’4’, African American and lives as a woman, wearing hair extensions and at St. Martin’s wears floral scrubs and a purse. The purse masks scoliosis that my guess was untreated in his youth. In 2006 I took my upper level photography class to St. Martin’s in the Pines to take portraits of the residents. It was a great match, my students were very slow, the residents enjoyed a real life activity, and the interaction was rewarding for both. I found a beautiful natural light location and each student printed a set of portraits to give to the residents, which were later hung on the walls before going to the family or to the subject.
Several weeks later Daryl, who legally changed his name to Daronesha asked if my students could videotape and photograph his pageant, The Platinum International Newcomers Pageant. I organized several students but the event was after the term had ended on a Sunday night close to Christmas. As the time approached I realized that I would be the only one that was going to show up. Because of my personal relationship with Daronesha and the staff at St. Martin’s, I was the only one that felt a sense of urgency; and would not let Daronesha down.
I arrived on time and set up in the dressing room. I learned later that the Pageants really start many hours after the time listed. I was in a room full of men, men dressing men, in their spandex and padding, the things they wore under their clothes, very naked, not literally but vulnerable. as they changed over many hours into their female personalities. I was struck by the dazzling personas, the complete brighter than life personalities, the amount of time spent on make-up and costuming, and the great sense of style even in the casual-wear of the non-stage personalities. There are contestants, entertainers, dressers, dressmakers and judges at the Pageant. They have family names, St. James, Starr, Onasus, Carrington, and Foxx. Each member has a mother and father in the system, as it is referred to and in turn must in time take on a daughter and a son. A pageant winner takes on duties for the entire reign to promote the system. Daryl said that he has garnered respect for his ability to run a successful pageant. Contestants and participants come from Memphis, New Orleans, Atlanta, and South Carolina. Daronesha has since lost his job at the nursing home and works at a BP.
Recently, at another club, I had set up early and in the quiet before everything started I asked to photograph one of the patrons. It turned out I had photographed her the week before as an entertainer in another pageant. She said as I was positioning her on the backdrop spot, “Everyone says I really look like a woman, I think I really was meant to be a woman.” Sinseriti expressed that the dressing and dazzling is not frivolous, it reaches her core. I see the dazzling and attention to dress in the Chapatoula Mardis Gras Indians, and in a sense in the elaborate dress of Southern Black women when they attend Church.
It wasn’t long into the project that I remembered that my sister in law mentioned that my brother who had died from complications from Aids had shown her a picture of himself dressed as a woman, on one of his many visits to her place in New Orleans. She asked if anyone had found the photograph in his apartment after he had died. She said she would love to see the picture again, that he was gorgeous. I did not know about it, my brother probably destroyed it knowing that he was dying.
I would give anything to see it myself.
Resignifying the Spectacle In The Work of Sonja Rieger
Since Madonna’s co-option of voguing for the sake of pop fluff in the ‘90s, popular culture has embraced drag as a signifier of flamboyance, excess, and downright fun. It is clear that the drag queen has achieved iconic status in American visual culture; however, a number of feminist authors criticize drag as simply another example of men’s objectification of women. They argue that drag performances degrade women, reducing them to their sexuality and turning the “female body” into a spectacle. Nevertheless, Sonja Rieger’s images in her recent exhibition entitled “Dazzling” are clearly a woman’s depiction of men fetishizing female sexuality. There is an apparent subversion of who is in control of the representation of woman-ness. Her portraits capture the human as opposed to the actor; the surface is impeccably packaged, but Rieger is depicting the essence. Though men are appropriating the sexual signifiers of femininity, Rieger is clearly the authority on how that femininity is displayed and perceived.
Rieger’s sometimes larger than life photographs capture every minute surface detail of her glamorously adorned sitters. The glossy finish on the images lends to the opulence of their satin, leather, and tulle handmade costumes. Nonetheless, the most striking characteristic of each image is the luminosity of the skin. Rieger renders the physicality of the skin; it is tactile and even sumptuous. The luxurious surface quality of the images makes them objects to covet and subjects to ogle. Rieger fixates on the physical allure present in the sitters creating dual feelings of curiosity and confusion in her viewers who are presumably entrenched in heteronormative notions of gender and sexuality.
Through juxtaposing images of what appears to be women with images that are easily read as men, Rieger calls attention to the fissure between illusion and truth. The images in “Dazzling” are clearly examples of the manufactured performance of a female identity. However, these identities can be further placed in archetypal female categories including the seductress, dominatrix, and diva. As actresses of sorts, it becomes natural that the women don the accoutrement of their “characters.” Their heavily applied makeup and glamorous costumes make it quite clear that these women represent extremes, but those same characteristics highlight the rupture in the “realness” of the images. In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler explores “realness” and the idea that flawless simulacrum is moot. Indeed, imitating woman-ness through drag is only relevant when there is a fracture in what would otherwise be considered the façade of a cross-dresser. Rieger artfully reveals these vital inconsistencies creating a topsy-turvy realm of identity ambivalence.
Notably, Rieger homes in on the depiction of a specifically black masculine taboo. Author bell hooks suggests, “The black male in drag was […] a disempowering image of black masculinity. […] Images of black men in drag were never subversive; they helped sustain sexism and racism.” In light of hooks’s statement one must reevaluate: is Rieger documenting a constructed image, or is she capturing the portrayal of a psychological self? Is this the co-option of masquerading frivolity, or are there larger socio-political issues at hand? Certainly, I believe that Rieger’s images capture a humanizing quality in her sitters that lend to their creation of a separate identity as self-actualizing individuals. Rieger underscores the dignity in her disenfranchised subjects who emanate a sense of agency and ownership over their status as queens.
Popular culture has long appropriated and hollowed the subculture revolving around black homosexuality. Between voguing icon Benny Ninja’s frequent appearances on Tyra Banks’s America’s Next Top Model and RuPaul’s reality show search for the next great drag star, one wonders if America just loves the drama or if we actually get the point. Working in a separate strain but still with the purpose of bringing the margin to the mainstream, Rieger’s exhibition takes the disenfranchised world of drag from the gritty underground to the austere walls of the gallery. However, Rieger makes this transition with a subtlety that speaks to the genuine accessibility of the women as opposed to their specialization as “other.” The images in “Dazzling” serve as thought provoking bits of what seems to be a phantasmatic world apart from our present society that tells us homosexuality and regularity are mutually exclusive. Instead, she creates an inclusive space capable of redefining the hegemonic criteria that designates normalcy.
- Lindsey O’Connor, April 20, 2010
Black Cultured Pearls
To protect itself from an irritant a layering of opalescent luster covers and transforms—a pearl is born. This cover becomes its identity.
Cultural imperialism with its essentialist roots seeks to define and group a la difference— a black pearl is not a white pearl. But biological determinism is problematic. If gender and sexual identity are genetic in origin then what’s the argument for privileging one over the other—this pearl over that one or this gender over that “other” one?
In John Water’s Female Trouble, Dawn (played by drag queen Divine) is picked up while hitchhiking by Earl (also played by Divine). Upon confronting Earl about the resultant pregnancy from their short, sexual drive, he screams at her, “Go fuck yourself,” which is exactly what happened in this performance. A man who performs in life as “Divine,” performs in the film as Dawn and Earl in an iterant process of gender bender. To borrow a term from Judith Butler, this “performativity” culturally constructs gender identity in the film as well as in life.
The perfect pearl is “identified” by its smooth, round, rare, and natural shell—the rare black one being valued more. A cultured black pearl however, is one that has been formed with human intervention in the pursuit of outer shell perfection—a beauty contest of sorts. The beauty contestant covers her flaws for the performance. This cover becomes her identity.
- Cooper Spivey, March, 2010
Dazzling is a portrait project that documents an amateur transit circuit. Transit is a self-described term used to define the men/women who are involved in various levels of gender transformation at the pageant. The subjects are primarily African American and the Pageant is held in a rented building converted into a temporary bar in the town of Fairfield, Alabama, a previously white steel town outside of Birmingham, Alabama, whose population is now 90.23% African American.
In 2007 I met Daryl who is well over six feet tall, Daryl works in a nursing home and wears floral scrubs, hair extensions, make-up and a purse that hides the extreme curve of his scoliosis—most likely untreated as a child. Daryl runs the Platinum Pageant at night, a transit contest that starts the pageant season in late December. It is a successful business venture where he earns respect for his ability to manage and operate the Pageant successfully. The Pageant has a system of families, each participant, has a mother and a father and each shares a family name, like Foxx, Chanel, La Shay, Onnasus and St. James. The new participants eventually become mothers or fathers to other transits. The family they have in the system is often more than they have at home.
The contestants set up in a dressing room and often take hours to get ready. A contestant will have four to six changes of clothes. They are flanked by dressers and sit completely still for hours as they are made-up, coifed and dressed. The “system” as it is called provides an environment, and support system for young men who may not have another place in the rigid society of the south.
I have a bond with Daryl because he works on the unit my mother has lived in since her debilitating stroke. The first day that I spent at the nursing home, I noticed that the staff was black and the residents were predominantly white. Ridin Dirty and Crank that Soulja Boy blared from a boom box in the sunlit dining room, played by the staff and not totally heard by the somewhat oblivious residents. It was ironic to me that this elderly population of a racially torn city lived the end of their lives so closely dependent on and inadvertently intermingled with the black population and culture that they had shared such a history with. Daryl legally changed his name to Daranesha D’nae Starr. Our relationship is an unlikely one; it is the collision of two worlds.
The photographs started as a favor to Daryl. The images are a way for me to illuminate the beauty and the vulnerability of these black men who are wrestling with their sexual identity. I am fascinated by the transformations that occur, it is not just sexual identity but at times a transformation into a complete persona and a totally developed character. Often times the identities are bigger and brighter than the fragile male persona that is evident when they are not dressed, which I have also photographed. When the men are dressed, they become silent and voiceless. They don’t speak because their male voices break the spell of who they are trying to be. It is also a population that is under educated and they are able to supplement their eight dollar an hour day jobs with tips from their performances.
I have photographed six Pageants over the last two years and I am scheduled to photograph the rest of the season. I will exhibit one of the prints in an exhibition in February at Maus Contemporary / beta pictoris gallery. Because many of the men are well over six feet tall, my plan is to print the images life-size. The scale gives the subjects a sense of dignity and also makes the viewer feel as though they are with them in the room. It is a confrontational technique that makes it difficult not to have empathy.
I am printing the photos 20 x 30 in order to proof them but as I receive funding I will outsource them to print them on a larger scale. I am also working with a colleague on video interviews so that we have some accurate documentation of the transit life.
The photographs are taken with a Canon Mark II camera and are printed on Hahnemuhle paper with archival pigment inks.
