Joel Parsons 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. His multidisciplinary art centers queer intimacy, and 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. He is a founding member of the ArtsMemphis Artist Advisory Council and serves on the Board of Directors of the UrbanArt Commission. He is represented by Sheet Cake Gallery.
Artist Statement
I’m building a speculative dance club for we who feel otherwise in a world on fire.
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 energies and selves that happens on those dancefloors, the intertwining and the disintegration, 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. Sumptuous surfaces and seductive color recall two forms of sanctuary: the tipsy maximalism of neon-drenched Saturday nights, and the sacred, communal spaces of Sunday morning. In this club, this louche sanctuary, 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.
$3,000.00
$4,000.00
