Looking Back at Summer Jade Leavitt: Language is Leaving Me
While we’re closed for the next few weeks for installation of our upcoming exhibitions, we look back at Summer Jade Leavitt’s recent multimedia installation, Language is Leaving Me, which was originally scheduled to open in conjunction with Pride Month but due to the COVID-19 pandemic was rescheduled to July 8 to August 15, 2020. The artist’s multimedia installation, The Language is Leaving Me, seeks to reckon with heteropatriarchal structures that disseminate through the body in language, time, and memory. The project transforms Locust Projects’ Project Room II into a dream-like queer bar environment.
“The installation features a video compiled of found footage- all karaoke videos- remixed and rearranged to write a narrative around constraints of language/history and queer time. Facing the video projection is a pink dentist chair that sits atop a pink, glowing, queer bar inspired stage: a site for losing ones ability to speak and a site for finding and expressing oneself. The project shifted slightly in content since the beginning of the pandemic - it feels slower and more concerned with survival, which is a pretty straightforward influence.”
— Summer Jade Leavitt
The dentist’s chair evokes an experience of being unable to talk, an invasion of space, pain, numbness, and something put in or removed from the mouth. Repurposed karaoke videos and their subtitles function as ready-made texts, a reflection of the artist's once weekly visits to a gay dive bar for karaoke. Like a ritual, the artist would spend a week with their feelings, and select a song that could offer a ceremony of speaking that reality into the world and releasing it. A liberating performance of desire, of calling, calling out, of where and who. A rehearsal space of identity, of being, becoming, imitating, mutating.
In the video above, see the exhibition and hear Summer Jade Leavitt talk about Language is Leaving Me in a video directed and produced by Zachary Balber and his team, Michael R. Lopez and Danielle Damas
According to the artist, “This is about the pain we carry in our mouths: language. How the ways we think and express ourselves can reflect the wounds created by a white supremacist heteropatriarchal state even when we do not intend for them to. Their harm penetrates us in ways we cannot immediately recognize.
When we carry patriarchy’s language, systems, stories, thought processes in us, their power recreates itself. Phantom penetration: when our bodies are used to keep their authority strong, their force alive, our selves compliant and unknowing, When we cannot talk about the wound without the wound reproducing itself. When we carry their structures within us. Their control finds ways of infiltrating, making delusions of itself, encrypting into our ways of being.
I think about voicelessness, bodilessness, spacelessness. Being outside of time, outside of space, outside of reality. I think about how we frame our realities. How long memory echoes out.
What is a queer memory? How does it move? What is a queer space? Where does it exist? What is a feeling? Where can it go?
I think about when my mouth was in pain and how I swished saltwater to remove the bacteria, protect myself from hurting. Letting the pain play in my mouth again and again like a song. Letting the joke of my bad teeth repeat and repeat until it became accepted as my reality.
I think about possible futures untangled from these systems and how to get there. A locating of the wound within and excavating it from the body. A constant holding accountable of complicity. Abolition. A daily exorcism. Of their languages, structures, ideals.
I think about echoing out. Disowning language, ceremoniously releasing, removing bacteria, excavating wounds, reinventing. Not reinventing. Newness altogether. This frozen space of memory. Always replaying. A permanently held space for practicing removal and searching for possible, joyful futures.”
On August 12, 2020, during the week of the show's closing, Leavitt organized a Watch party supporting (F)empower, an organization of queer culture shifters creating a radical feminist awakening in Miami. The program consisted of an online screening of two short films by Maya Deren, Meshes of the Afternoon and At Land, followed by a conversation led by Summer Jade Leavitt and (F)empower leader Andrea Rodriguez. To begin the program, Leavitt spoke about her creative practice, her inspiration behind this new project, her experience bringing it to life, and more. Then, Andrea Rodriguez explained (F)empower’s mission and gave many options on how to help the organization with their cause, one of them being to donate to (F)empower's Community Bond Fund, which allows them to post bond for those who can’t afford it. The night continued with the screening of both of Maya Deren’s short films, after which everyone got to discuss and share their opinions about the films and ask more questions to both the artist and the organization leader.
Watch the full program in the following video:
ABOUT THE ARTIST
“I see a new direction in my practice shifting towards just embracing ideas and integrating them into daily life and maybe making more text based work than anything else. My priorities are less on creating a physical object and more of just an experience that can be enjoyable and cathartic.”
— Summer Jade Leavitt
Summer Jade Leavitt is an artist and writer working to figure out what a queer future looks like. Through text, photo, artifacts, and video, they approach everyday life as a site for performance, documenting gestures large and small to archive and historicize them. Looking at pop culture, history, music videos, film, and theory, they aim to confuse lineages and authenticity. Their performative existence is a sci-fi documentary: all real, all fake. They seek to locate origins of trauma and excavate them from the body, creating space for all that has been lost, and all that is yet to come.
Summer Jade Leavitt's publications include Mad Girl's Crush Tweet, published by Headmistress Press; "Carol" published by Poets.org; and "Carol", "Carol Too", "Remains", and "This is Not Fiction", published by The Oakland Review. Leavitt's work has been exhibited at many galleries and museums nationwide, with recent exhibitions including: Possible Bodies, Phosphor Project Space, Pittsburgh, PA (2019); Nearest Neighbors, Powder Room, Pittsburgh, PA (2019); Headmistress Press AWP reading at Like Nobody's Business, Portland, OR (2019); The Self, Realized: Queering the Art of Self-Portraiture, Brew House Association, Pittsburgh, PA (2019); Ten Futures, 937 Gallery, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Pittsburgh, PA (2019); Erotica Night, Bunker Projects, Pittsburgh, PA (2019); Matter & Memory Group Show, The Factory at Bard, Berlin, DE (2018); Dot Gov, Miller Institute of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2018); ephemera, Future Tenant, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Pittsburgh, PA (2018); Erotica Night, Bunker Projects, Pittsburgh, PA (2018); We Have a Future, Perhaps, The Frame at Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA (2017); "Untitled (Making Myself into a Monument)", Pittsburgh Performance Art Festival, Pittsburgh, PA (2017); The Kitchen Sink, 3577 Studios, Pittsburgh, PA (2017); Power & The Soul, The Frame at Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh PA (2017); Be Somebody With A Body, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA (2016); Nightmare, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA (2016); From The Dream To The Cosmos, The Frame at Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA (2016); Stairwell Show, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY (2014); Scholastic Gold Key Winners, Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL (2013); Senior Showcase, Artseen, Miami, FL (2013); Works of Eight, New World Gallery, Miami, FL (2011); Fluxus, Culture Center, Chicago, IL (2011); Showcase, Grossman Gallery, Boston, MA (2011).
Locust Projects 2020-2021 exhibitions and programming are made possible with support from: The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners, The Children's Trust; Berkowitz Contemporary Foundation; The National Endowment for the Arts Art Works Grant; Hillsdale Fund; the Albert and Jane Nahmad Family Foundation; VIA Art Fund | Wagner Incubator Grant; Funding Arts Network; The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation; Susan and Richard Arregui; Kirk Foundation; Miami Salon Group; Scott Hodes; Jones Day; Community Recovery Fund at The Miami Foundation and the Wege Foundation; and the donors to the Still Making Art Happen Campaign and Locust Projects Exhibitionist members.