10.26.2024 – 12.7.2024

Made in My Bedroom 

Featuring:
John Bertle
David Gilbert
Jim Isermann
Daniel Arthur Mendoza

NOON Projects is honored to present “Made in My Bedroom” a group exhibition featuring John Bertle, David Gilbert, Jim Isermann, and Daniel Arthur Mendoza.

In 2020, John Bertle, David Gilbert, Jim Isermann, and Daniel Arthur Mendoza started a book club to read Queer Theory. Having met through the University of California - Riverside’s MFA Art program, the group was comprised of one alum, two current students, and one professor. An informal education began. They met weekly over Zoom during the first dark year of the pandemic, reading works by José Esteban Munõz, Olivia Laing, and Jack Halberstam. And, the group stuck together, flourished, yet was fluid: they read a gay detective novel, watched movies (by Pedro Almodovar, Derek Jarman, Marlon Riggs, Ang Lee). Four years later, the group still meets: sometimes to discuss books they've read, sometimes to catch up and spill the tea.

This exhibition is composed of artworks each artist has made over the last four years. An overlapping section of a Venn diagram of their practices and interests would include textiles, queer joy, flowers, gay aesthetics, and craft. In the bigger front room of the gallery, each artist exhibits a large work whose subject is fabric or textiles, while in the smaller second gallery, the mode is of collaborative installation. In the smaller gallery, drawings and studies by each artist hang alongside and on top of larger gestures such as photo murals, vinyl cutouts, and stamps which decorate the walls.

The first book they read, Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, can be read as a guidebook for the group's ethos. It clearly and repeatedly discusses how to learn from the past while striving for a utopian (yet ultimately unattainable) future. It lays the groundwork for this in the present by rejecting norms of the day. As an intergenerational group of queers, this meant slightly different things to each member; discussing those differences expanded each person’s understanding and appreciation of the text.

While the group started as an academic pursuit, it quickly became more than that. It was a reliable once-a-week check-in that provided sustenance, especially during the isolating lockdown of 2020. It has become a way of building unexpected community and friendship that feels contemporary: they mostly meet virtually. But it has been a source of true connection, allowing each member to get to know one another well and to remain close.

Group Exhibition

Opening
October 26, 2024
6–9 PM

On View Through December 7, 2024