Kansas City, MO, January 4, 2023: Charlotte Street is thrilled to announce the first exhibition of 2023, Housewives of the Queer Hearth Featuring HotQH TV. An openingreception will be held on January 27, 2023 from 6PM to 9PM at the Charlotte Street gallery at 3333 Wyoming, Kansas City, MO and remain on view through March 4, 2023. The Housewives of the Queer Hearth is an installation and curatorial collaboration between Rosa Nussbaum and Kevin Brophy featuring HotQH TV: p1nkstar, Anna Azizzy, and Summer Jade Leavitt. (Pronouns: Rosa Nussbaum (they/them), Kevin Brophy (she/her), p1nkstar (she/her), Anna Azizzy (they/them), Summer Jade Leavitt (they/them).
Housewives of the Queer Hearth is an immersive, multimedia installation that proposes an alternate, future world by Rosa Nussbaum and Kevin Brophy. The artists blend digital media and performance—both embodied and disembodied through simulated experiences—with exaggerated home décor to build on gendered histories of architecture and interior design. The exhibition takes the form of a space that has yet-to-be: one that centralizes and publicly showcases overlooked narratives through comedic performances set in a boudoir, the “woman’s private bedroom.” The boudoir expands beyond the walls across the media that infiltrates that space. This includes the fictional broadcasting outlet, HotQH TV, which features other queer media artists whose various works thematically deal with gender and sexuality using satire and humor, and curated texts from The Queer Theory Library as a Reading Room.
The installation blends the virtual and the tactile with campy furniture, such as a hyper-elongated, curvy chaise lounge outfitted with video displays and upholstered in hand-printed material feminist city plans, custom rugs that describe the floorplan and linguistic history of interior spaces, and a TV cabinet outfitted with fortune-telling crystal blue balls. Media such as The Greeters subverts-by-borrowing the authoritative tone of industry and commerce, such as World’s Fair attractions and Monsanto’s Tomorrowland “House of the Future,” with humor and unabashed flamboyance.
The work is bright, exuberant, and comedic, full of fantasy and play despite dealing with very real socio-political issues and lived experiences. The installation re-imagines the broader city as in continuum with domestic labor in the home (e.g. kitchenless houses). By materializing the ‘utopic’ contrary, the work exposes social and physical structures that serve to undermine equity.
These elements are built on ongoing research that includes theory, Aaron Betsky’s Queer Space, which argues that architecture and urban planning are patriarchal projections functioning to reinstate their own dominance; from popular nonfiction, Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women, intent on examining gender data-gap in design from the size of bricks to the bias in infrastructural road work; to historical furniture design, the Duchesse Brisée chaise lounge—aka, the scissoring chair—and early 20th century utopian feminist architectural design and city-planning, such as Marie Howland, Melusina Fay Peirce and Alice Constance Austin.
Informed by this research project and the objects and media throughout the exhibition space, a Reading Room has been set up in the on-site Kemper Library. Summer Jade Leavitt, director of The Queer Theory Library, has curated a selection of books from their library as a response to this presentation of Housewives of the Queer Hearth and the HotQH TV artists’ media. Summer Jade Leavitt is an artist, writer, filmmaker, and performer thinking about queer histories, lineages, and futures. Seeking to locate origins of trauma and excavate them from the body, they are creating space for all that has been lost, all that is yet to come.
HotQH TV is both additional programming in the speculative world of Housewives of the Queer Hearth and an extension of the exhibition itself. The series of videos include pop music and performative vignettes by two artists, p1nkstar and Anna Azizzy whose respective work encompasses performance and music.
p1nkstar creates a world far removed from this dimension’s binaries through music and conceptual shows, merging hyperpop with neo-perreo and club. She has been described as “early Aughts Paris Hilton on Hello Kitty steroids” by The Austin Chronicle, who crowned her as their Pop Princess in 2020. Since 2016, p1nkstar has rapidly become an emblematic figure in the Texas arts and nightlife scenes by opening inclusive spaces that center the work of trans and queer artists.
Anna Azizzy is a Pittsburgh artist processing their past and procuring their queer/trans future through performance. By reimagining themself, Azizzy discovers who they wish to become, soothes the shame of being, and celebrates the queerness we work so hard to enjoy. Azizzy’s practice spans many mediums, including performance/video art, experimental music, and carpentry.
Programming
Opening Reception
Fri, January 27, 2023
6:00 PM – 9:00 PM CST
Charlotte Street Gallery
RSVP HERE bit.ly/housewives-queer-hearth
No Cookies for You!💗
February 14, 2023,
6pm-7:00pm
(7pm EST and 11am GMT+11)
RSVP HERE bit.ly/no-cookies-for-you
No Cookies for You!💗
In conjunction with the exhibition Housewives of the Queer Hearth and as additional programming for HotQH TV: a speculative queer feminist broadcasting corporation, we are pleased to invite you to “No Cookies for You!💗” Hosts Rosa Nussbaum and Kevin Brophy lead a digital cooking show turned workshop on how to make non-edible Valentine’s cookies. By building from the work of Alice Constance Austin’s early 20th century designs for kitchen-less homes of an idealized city focused on communal care, the artists remove the domestic labor of the day. So, please come. Join us in making art for yourself rather than sustenance for another, as your love act for V-day. Morning talk show hosts, eat Our hearts out!
ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET
Charlotte Street centers Kansas City’s most forward-thinking visual artists, writers, and performers—acting as the primary incubator, provocateur, and connector for the region’s contemporary arts community, and its leading advocate on the national stage. Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $2 million in awards and grants to artists and their innovative projects, and connected individual artists to each other and to the greater Kansas City community. For more information about Charlotte Street, its awards, programs, and initiatives, visit www.charlottestreet.org.
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