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>>> Rashaad Newsome at Art Gallery of York University

RASHAAD NEWSOME at Art Gallery of York University (4700 Keele, Accolade East building), to June 14. 416-736-5169. Rating: NNNN


Many popular art forms have a strong queer presence, but hip-hop has until recently seemed resistant to queer content. Gender-bending performers like Big Freedia and Mykki Blanco are changing that, along with New Orleans-born, New York City-based artist Rashaad Newsome. 

Out people of colour are well represented in the visual arts, and Newsome has made it his mission to bring vogue, ballroom and hip-hop culture into galleries and museums. Collages and videos in his Canadian debut, Silence Please, The Show Is About To Begin (co-presented by the Images Festival), use an array of digital techniques to recycle emblems of wealth from the elite to the street while celebrating the queer and transgender performers he sets among them. 

For his collages, Newsome draws on his study of European coats of arms, inspired by the ballroom and Mardi Gras practice of crowning kings and queens. Displaying the works on paper in shiny, lacquered antique frames pimped out with snakeskin and braid, he replaces swords and heraldic beasts with assorted bling: high-end watch faces, diamonds, gold chains and fancy car hubs. 

Two videos, Knot and Icon, digitally superimpose vogue dancers onto patterns similar to the those in the collages, as well as on vaulted Gothic cathedral ceilings ornamented with bling and rotating architectural structures made of jewellery elements. 

The astute Shade Compositions, a video of one of series of performances that Newsome brought to museums and art fairs, leaves the bling thing behind. Sitting at a laptop mixing sound with the aid of two modified Wii controllers, Newsome conducts a choir of chicly attired women and queer men who are “throwing shade.” Their gestures, sounds and words stylishly express a range of emotions from irritated to scornful to pissed-off in this symphony of attitude, their small mannerisms blown up to a grand, operatic scale. 

In Newsome’s world, the reversals and re-appropriations that have always been part of queer artistic and survival strategies work just as elegantly as they always have. 

art@nowtoronto.com

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