Catherine Lord is Professor of Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine. She is a writer, artist, and curator whose work addresses issues of feminism, cultural politics, and colonialism.
She is the author of two text/image experimental narratives, The Summer of Her Baldness: A Cancer Improvisation (University of Texas Press) and Son Colibri, Sa Calvitie, Miss Translation (L’une bevue, Paris). Her critical essays and fiction have been published in Afterimage, Art & Text, Artcoast, New Art Examiner, Whitewalls, Framework, Documents, Art Journal, GLQ, X-tra and Art Paper, as well as the collections The Contest of Meaning, Reframings: New American Feminisms in Photography, The Passionate Camera, Hers 3 Space, Site and Intervention: Issues in Installation and Site-Specific Art, Decomposing, The Art of Queering in Art, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, and En Todas Partes: Politicas de la Diversidad en El Arte. She is currently collaborating with Richard Meyer on a book titled Art and Queer Culture, 1885–2005 (Phaidon Press) and a text/image project titled, The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men.
Lord’s work as a visual artist was included in the 1995 inaugural of Site Santa Fe, and has been shown at the New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Post Gallery, Thomas Jancar Gallery, Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, and other venues. Her site-specific project To Whom It May Concern was included in the exhibition Cruising the Archive: Queer Art and Culture in Los Angeles, 1945-1980, which opened at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives in October, 2011 (http://cruisingthearchive.org/towhomitmayconcern).
Artist's Statement
I tend to precarity. I work in the minefields between image and text, fiction and fact, the personal and the theoretical. I don’t rest upon a particular practice. I like theories more than the prose in which theory is generally couched. I trust images more than words. Fractionally. Thus I consider myself a visual artist.
I seek stories that can’t find a route to the surface of the archive, stories hidden in plain sight, stories drawn between the lines. I photograph ink on paper. I photograph, with care, statements that cause something to be true by the act of making the statement.
In the series, Lecture, the statements are the dedications slipped between the title page and the frontispiece of queer books. These dedications can be retrieved only by touching a dying medium. Dedications are at once intimate and irrevocably public. Though everything happens in code, the diptychs are not footnotes to a story told elsewhere. My interest is not particular identities, but a network of generosity. My quarry is the skin of the gift, the cuts and bruises and stains by which queer culture is formed.
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