danileyakosover-ayala

[danileyakosover-ayala]

ARTIST STATEMENT

This curation meditates on themes of bodily relationality, proximity, the politics of touch, and the inherent erotic captured in moments of rest. As carved out by Maracharia Keguro’s theorization on ‘frottage,’ I explore what it means to consider all things touching at once in scenes of rest or scenes that may mimic restfulness— including body posture, facial expression, background, foreground, duration of time in space. I do this in order to better understand the inherent multiplicity of Black queer diasporic experience, and what such a lens may teach all of us about deepening our connection to moments and figures that seem singular/definite. Furthermore, I include critical quotations from Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power” to convey a linkage between frottage and the erotic, suggesting that when a person, or two, or multiple, intimately converge in/ with space, there are both inherent limitations/frictions to this meeting point as well as ample possibility to locate power in the realm of the nonverbal and in the spirit.

[danileyakosover-ayala]

F  R  O  T  T  A  G  E

: the technique of creating a design by rubbing (as with a pencil) over an object placed underneath the paper

: the act of obtaining sexual stimulation by rubbing against a person or object

[danileyakosover-ayala]

Theorizing Frottage

"I use frottage, a relation of proximity, to figure the black diaspora, for doing so unsettles the heteronormative tropes through which the black diaspora has been imagined and idealized. Frottage captures the aesthetic (as a term of artistic practice) and the libidinal (as a term of sex practice), and so gestures to the creative ways the sexual can be used to imagine and create worlds. 

...

The evidence frottage provides creates the grounds for speculation, and takes seriously the work speculation does in enlarging our apprehension of the world and our possibilities for being in the world. 

...

"...a term that keeps the body seeking sexual pleasure in view. Frottage feels less freighted than terms like fucking and sucking and fisting, terms that, as they have circulated within queer studies, have become identified as gay male sex practices, even when, as with fisting, they have the power to disrupt gendered and sexed positions... an awkward term, one that hinted at strangers rubbing themselves against others in public spaces, at the ways the public pursuit of pleasure can often be uncomfortable and coercive... to foreground their ongoing rubbing, leading, at times, to pleasure, and, at other times, to irritation, and even possibly to pain.”

...

“... frottage to foreground this intense longing for intimacy. By foregrounding desire and longing, I depart from genealogical models that anchor that definite article within a logic of kinship, whether that be biogenetic or fictive kinship. More precisely, I explore how blackness emerges and what it comes to mean without anchoring it to a genealogical tree. Instead of searching for kinship, I privilege conceptual and affective proximity: the rubbing produced by and as blackness, which assembles into one frame multiple histories and geographies.” 

...

“...frottage to suggest diaspora as a multiplicity of sense-apprehensions, including recognition, disorientation, compassion, pity, disgust, condescension, lust, titillation, arousal, and exhaustion. I want to approximate as much as possible the range of bodily sensations produced by the insistent touching that is diaspora.” 

...

(excerpts from Macharia Keguro’s Introduction to “Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across the Black Diaspora”)

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Wriply M. Bennet— Mama’s Bed (2021)

“More than simply proximity, it is the active and dynamic ways blackness is produced and contested and celebrated and lamented as a shared object. It is bodies rubbing against and along bodies. Histories rubbing along and against histories. It is the shared moments of black joy and black mourning” (Keguro 14)

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Sola Olulode-- Entwined (2020)

[Ink, oil and wax on canvas]

“Taking  nothing  for  granted,  we  explore  and create new ways to imagine and be with each other” (Keguro 14)

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sensuality, intimacy, the erotic

how can we see meeting points, indeed moments of frottage, as sites of intention and power?

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWmq9gw4Rq0 

“the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to any women who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough”

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Mickalene Thomas – Sleep: Deux femmes noires (2012)

[rhinestone, acrylic paint, and oil enamel on wood panel]

“linger  at these  fragments  to pursue a broader reparative goal: to find ‘sustenance’ where it has often been deemed absent  or  scarce” (Keguro 13)

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Jonathan Lyndon Chase-- Because of the way I feel under you (2021)

[watercolor pen marker on paper]

re: layers; resting ON/WITH, rest and the erotic

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“The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling”

 (Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic)

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Zanele Muholi-- Catilin and I (2009)

“Frottage  tries  to  grasp  the  quotidian  experiences  of  intra-racial  experience,  the  frictions  and irritations and translations and mistranslations, the moments when blackness coalesces through pleasure and play and also  by  resistance to  anti-blackness” (Keguro 14).

re: resting ON, frottage with sheets/ cotton/ flesh and bones/ the erotic

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Jonathan Lyndon Chase-- 2 lovers crossing (2018)

[Acrylic, glitter, pastel, rhinestones and marker on canvas]

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Sola Olulode-- I’m Feeling It (2019)

[oil, wax, and oil bar on canvas]

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rest IN

swallow

entwinement

morph

soak

amalgamation

cover

ensconce

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Rest ON

weight

measurements

calculation

reliance

layers

dimensions

separate togetherness

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Zanele Muholi-- Reclining Figure (2006)

“Frottage  does  not  provide  a  complete  narrative  or  even  signal  where  the researcher  should look; at best, its traces demonstrate that someone or something has passed through a space and left some kind of evidence” (Keguro 13).

re: evidence on sheets; sheets & naked bodies, cotton (sheets) and Black femme body, covering of explicitly erogenous zones 

[danileyakosover-ayala]

Jonathan Lyndon Chase-- Man Lying in Garden Bed (2016) 

[Acrylic and marker on cotton bed sheet]

re: frottage with ground, nude body and garden, rest ON/WITH

[danileyakosover-ayala]

by Mickalene Thomas

re: resting on, being with, the erotic as presence, as intention, as power