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Crosstown Arts presents “But Then, Suddenly, I Was Looking From the Inside Out” by Coe Lapossy on the East Pop-Out Walls.
The East Pop-Out Walls at Crosstown Arts
On view through Sunday, January 21, 2024
Tickets: Free and open to the public
The first time Coe Lapossy heard someone talk about compartmentalizing their life, so they could make all the separate and demanding things work together, theyI were a kid watching a television interview with Jodie Foster. It was the typical interview question, “How do you handle such a busy life? How do you accomplish all this?” Foster very nonchalantly explained that she just compartmentalizes everything. Lapossy remembers realizing that this was a completely unfamiliar way of being. They did not understand what Jodie was talking about, and they did not believe they could live that way. But Then, Suddenly, I Was Looking From the Inside Out is about “no compartments.” Everything is mashing together in life all the time — and while Lapossy longs for stability and order — it’s all happening at once and they love how that feels — what that allows for. Not to be confused with multitasking, this is a kind of nurtured chaos.
Through a resistance to the tenants of modernism, Coe Lapossy centers erased histories and marginalized labor. They create work that revels in the subversive, how it sneaks in and makes change, how it works undetected because it must. They revisit artifacts of queerness wedged within a seemingly straight world, choosing these references, linking narratives from various times throughout history, things forgotten, erased, messages that “flew under the radar.” With the reuse of these artifacts they create a meditation on what bodies we value, how we memorialize, and what/who survives under the conditions we create.
