Club Rapture and the Ecstasy Afters

New work by Joel Parsons

Sheet Cake Gallery is proud to announce Joel Parsons’ first solo exhibition at the gallery, opening on April 5 from 5 - 7:30 PM and on view through May 17, 2025. 

Club Rapture and the Ecstasy Afters invites the viewer to revel in a space where desire and joy are released exponentially with each beat of the music; where lovers, friends and strangers can move their bodies freely despite existing in a world that questions their right to exist, and to love. In this exhibition, Parsons expands the “Speculative Dance Club for We Who Feel Otherwise in a World on Fire” in which the legacy of the Stonewall Inn undergirds the necessity of queer space and togetherness, and the memory of Pulse Nightclub is carried. The work is staged throughout the gallery to signal the progression of the evening - the anticipation of entering the dance club, moving with the music through the space, stepping away from the crowd in the bathroom, and the mix of feelings in the early hours as the music fades. 

This new body of work demonstrates Parsons’ prodigious ability to move between different materials and media to evoke the complexities of personal and shared experiences. Sound, installation, painting, drawing, and stained glass utilizing the wall and floor create an immersive, deeply poetic and urgent understanding. Dualities abound as references to Baroque and Renaissance art history and religious symbolism converge with disco to elicit the ecstatic. In both the church and the dance club, one communes with something larger than oneself, finds safety and meaning, experiences hope and excitement. Religious ecstasy is conflated with the sexual, celebration mingles with grief, the rose is a romantic gesture and the object of affection. Stained glass is both sturdy yet fragile, and transforms the light passing through it as we are transformed by the events and people surrounding us. This is a place to feel free and alive, to cast protection over friends and loved ones. 

A statement from Parsons reads:

In the ecstatic architecture of smoke and light, in swirls of mylar confetti and sprays of sweat and champagne, in love and in lust, we writhe and grind against the too-rational grid of the light-up disco dancefloor. We discover the limits and possibilities of our bodies through the pressure of bodies dancing with and against us, desire made flesh. We understand each other corporeally, partaking in a knowledge embodied and shared freely on the dancefloors of the Stonewall Inn and Pulse Nightclub and my local gay bar.

 

I chase after the exponential multiplication of energy and selves that happens on those dancefloors, the intertwining and the leaving, the assembling and the falling apart, the throb and the ache. I catch a glimpse of rapture, a spark of connection, a moment of longing, then distill it and freeze it in fragile glass. In this club, in this work, earnest and embarrassingly romantic roses are kissed by shafts of theatrical light. Thorns become tears, and tears become sweat as we dance in the hope of finding new ways of knowing and being known, beholding and being held, loving and being loved - a horizon for us to dance toward, together. 

 

About the artist // Joel Parsons (b. 1985, Springdale, Arkansas) is an artist, curator, and teacher based in Memphis, TN where he is an Assistant Professor of Art, Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Director of Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College. He has been shown at Flyweight Projects in New York, NY; the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, CA; Yale University’s Greene Gallery; Western Exhibitions in Chicago, IL; and the Yerba Buena Art Center Triennial in San Francisco, CA. He is the cofounder of Beige, an alternative gallery and performance space devoted to the work of LGBTQ+ artists. His queer country music band and performance art project, The Sissy Dicks, has released three albums and regularly plays venues in the Southeastern United States, including Goner Fest in Memphis, TN and the Spellcasters Maritime Ball in New Orleans, LA. He received a BA from Rhodes College, Phi Beta Kappa, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was awarded the John Quincy Adams Fellowship. His writing has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Art Papers, and Art in America. Parsons is represented by Sheet Cake Gallery.