Queer Collage

Lucas Hilderbrand
Film and Media Studies
UC Irvine

This project proposes a multi-program public partnership between UC Irvine and the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives to offer the first exhibition and public discussion exploring the aesthetic, theoretical, and historical trajectories of collage as a queer medium. The use of collage techniques by queer artists, both amateur and professional, has a particularly rich yet under-explored history. Collage perverts the social, political, and cultural specificity of images, promiscuously excerpting and recontextualizing. As a practice, queer collage negotiates the public (through print publications or other found objects) and the private (through personal crafting). This partnership seeks to make such rich creative work more visible and part of community conversations. Comprised of a gallery exhibition, print publication, online exhibition, campus symposium, and campus exhibition, this project reflected the multiplicity of collage practice itself and comes directly out of faculty and student collaborative research in Visual Studies at UCI.