Queer Matchmaking
Make new queer connections with the help of matchmaker Cleo Taurus of Glitterally!
Glitterally.
Femme-centric collection of kinkwear FOR. EVERY. BODY.
Cleo Taurus
Can you find her? Campy filthy drag queen and sex worker looking for thrills and making lots of spills.
Glamour City
80s glamour dress up party centered around a vintage makeover and photoshoot experience.
Fringe With Benefits
Custom-made glamorous fringe face masks. Proceeds support fringe performance art.
Truth Baby
A fertile memoir of a 10-month durational performance enacting a pregnancy.
Admit It
An interactive choose your own adventure movie theater experience staffed by a cast of unlikely characters.
Just Goodnight, Not Goodbye
Durational performance featuring a young girl reciting an unrequited love letter to strangers on Omegle.
Heart Melt Cafe
Performance inviting strangers to share an ice cream sundae in front of a game show audience.
Runaway Dreamhouse
Performance in the mall launching the runaway dreamhouse that allows you to run away for real.
I Am A Bad Ass Bitch
A self affirmation album featuring drag king, Rick Havoc.
Cry Aid
An infomercial, field guide, and kit to help you cry in public.
If Lost, Please Return To:
An exhibition of paintings and interactive objects exploring memory and girlhood.
Seriously Playing Pretend
A series of video installations exploring the performativity of femininity.
KT’s Life Annotated
An ongoing project annotating a childhood diary and other documents that weave poetry with slippery memories.
Gender Perceptions
A series of portraits exploring perception and gender expression.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
When I was a year old I shoved a piece of meat up my nose. Only after weeks of trying to remedy my ‘bad breath’ did my mother take me to the doctor who removed it. I only remember my mother telling me this while pointing to a photograph. I’m a vegan.
This process of looking through a lens of the present into the past creates connections via the coincidental, which allow memories to reveal themselves in new ways. It distorts subjects and chronology and subsequently confuses cause and effect. To search just below the surface of these documents, photographs, diary entries, and personal notes uncovers awkwardness and trauma loaded with gendered constructs and sexual scripts.
Performative re-enactments housed in interactive found object installations or site-specific performances, transport the viewer into these memories alongside me. The interactive nature of the project provides an experiential understanding of gendered experience, both in physical space and via the facade of virtual anonymity, allowing viewers to come face to face with their own beliefs regarding gender and development. It is through this serious play that I begin to take an authorial role of the meanings of my experiences.
BIO:
Katie Gentner was raised in various states across the Midwest, but lived their early adult life in Southeastern Wisconsin. Gentner received their Bachelor of Arts with a minor in psychology from the University of Wisconsin Parkside in 2015. During their undergraduate career, they were the first visual artist to receive the Teresa Peck Award for Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies for Gender Perceptions, a series of portrait paintings exploring perception, gender, and the gaze. In their final term, Gentner received the Wisconsin Study Abroad Grant to study drawing and art history in Italy during the summer of 2015. Upon arriving back in the states, Gentner spent a year as the artist in residence at Living Resource Center, a collaborative space providing various services essential to spiritual, mental, and physical well-being. In Fall 2016, they moved to the South to pursue their Masters of Fine Art at the University of Tennessee while serving a graduate teaching appointment.
During graduate studies, Gentner’s art practice quickly and vastly expanded to include interactive and performative works which were based in installation; such as, If Lost, Please Return To: an exhibition of paintings and interactive objects exploring memory and girlhood.
Gentner’s work has been featured in local, regional, and international exhibitions, including Au Natural: The Nude in the 21st Century, Astoria, OR; Beloit and Vicinity Exhibition, Beloit, WI, as well as in non-traditional art spaces, such as Knoxville Center Mall.
CONTACT/FOLLOW:Gentner.k.r@gmail.com