lavender menace poster archive (2013-2023)
There are currently three main components to the lavender menace poster project. The first and largest component is the multiple series of posters (more than 500) and large scale stencils that range from letterpress prints to laser cut handmade paper sheets, which include variations on twenty core slogans and phrases. These posters can be easily installed in public and gallery space, but can also be used as demonstration signage or window display.
The second component is a small edition of 25 artist books that are both bound collections and activist toolkits; complete with instructions and functional stencils that double as projection tools and hand made paper stickers. The books are meant to be the most participatory element of the project and are meant as starter kits to let participants signal to each other and the rest of their environment.
The third component is made up of limited edition ephemera and wearable objects. This includes everything from 4 letterpress printed and hand sewn jumpsuits (or wearable books) that will serve as uniforms for my street team to publicly install the work, to 50 glow in the dark buttons, 50 custom printed matchboxes, and 125 stickers designed to subvert the human rights campaign’s infamous equal sign logo. These are all visibility tools meant as a way of entering public dialogue and promoting queer visibility.
This project is the culmination of the book arts skill sets I have learned at Columbia, applied to queer art, queer theory and queer politics that I have surveyed and filtered through the lens of my lived experience. This work is the clarification of my voice as an artist and as a politically conscious woman. My hope is that the voice and messaging of this work is strong enough to engage, intrigue and enlist the public in a conversation about the queer politic in this moment of marriage equality in every format, from gallery show, to public bathroom, stenciled street art, glowing lapel button and instructional artist book. I want to enable radical queers to signal to each other (and to the public), to feel both visible and included in the public conversation about what constitutes gay equality in 2015 through the production of these various art objects. In making this work, I also aim to run hard interference on the Human Rights Campaign’s insidious, whitewashed, neocapitalist quest for the most profitable commodification of the the gay agenda.