Lesbian Legacies #2 Archive Affections

Presented as a dialogical juxtaposition, the show brings together two distinct bodies of work that approach lesbian historiography and institutional critique from different angles: while Wilson constructs a fictional artist biography, McClodden reconstructs the life of a real historical figure. Wilson’s Fauve Semblant: Peter (A Young English Girl) (1989) imagines a fictional biography of a lesbian artist in modernist avant-garde Paris as a subversive intervention into cultural memory, referencing the play with identity in Duchampian conceptual art. McClodden’s Sleight of Figure [for Gladys] (2024) is a work of ›re-memory‹ that artistically revisits the life of blues singer Gladys Bentley, who identified as a Black Lesbian Masculine and whose identity was suppressed under the homophobic repression of the McCarthy era.