This June, building upon the success of last year’s Queer Letterpress Exhibition and the Queer Print + Zine Fair, Zygote Press will continue to celebrate and promote queer artists with the exhibition Incantations, conceived by Cleveland-based artist Jen P. Harris. Incantations centers queer artists who engage with process-centered art practices that question form, presence, identity, and world-building. This exhibition includes drawings and collage-based paintings by Harris alongside paintings, textiles, prints, and sculptures by Ajdin Kulić (Cleveland), E.E. Ikeler (New York), Fidencio Fifield-Perez (Minneapolis), Leeza Meksin (New York), Sarana Mehra (Los Angeles), and R Kauff (Cleveland).

Originally planned as a solo exhibition, Incantations expanded to include six additional artists when Harris partnered with Zygote Press. The diamond-shaped “tiles” in Harris’s paintings are based on the winged beasts and flames of a thirteenth-century apocalypse manuscript, which she painstakingly copies, then cuts up and reconfigures. Motivating this body of work is a series of questions: When you’re living inside one story, how can you see around or beyond it? What patterns lie hidden beneath indoctrinated ideals and conventions? How do received narratives change when viewed through a queer lens? These questions guided the curation of the group show: the exhibiting artists radically transform materials or symbols, often through repetitive, accumulative actions that suggest ritual or spell-casting. Fragmented bodies, plants, and structures recombine into forms that refuse to cohere into expected narratives. Different scenarios come into view.

This project is supported by The Satellite Fund, administered by SPACES and funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Regional Regranting Program.

ZYGOTE PRESS
1410 East 30th Street
Cleveland, Ohio 44114
zygotepress.org
216.621.2900

EVENTS

Protest Printmaking: Block-print Your Own Propaganda with Tahm Lytle, 5:30-9:30pm Sunday, June 2 & Wednesday, June 5. Pay what you can.

Incantations, June 7–August 24. Opens 5-8pm Friday, June 7. Additional programming TBA

Screenprinting Basics with Hannah Manocchio, 5:30-8:30pm Thursday, June 13

Zine Making with Sequoia Bostick & Andy Passchier, 10am-4pm Sunday, June 30