Guen Montgomery will present a lecture about her work while sharing
images from her art practice, which draws inspiration from her rural
Appalachian heritage and identity as a femme gay person. She is interested
in the complexity and inherent theatricality of real and imagined human
characters. She will discuss the performative intricacies of gender, queerness
and societal expectations, and the varied identities which haunt the words
queer, lesbian, and femme. Through the lens of material culture and her
extended family’s fraught relationship to objects, she will explore the
complexities of class, consumerism, and the lasting legacy of possessions.
The objects we surround ourselves with, and eventually dispose of, tell
stories about us. Guen considers connections between our possessions, their
cycle of acquisition and disposal, and the performance of identity curation
and construction.
Guen Montgomery is an artist and performer whose work investigates
identity through studies of gender, regional narrative, and family mythology.
Her recent work looks at the queer life of things, the longing to acquire, and
how objects perform identity. Materially, Montgomery’s work is located in
the intersections between printmaking, performance, and sculpture.
Montgomery has exhibited nationally and internationally and has work in
multiple public collections including the Centre for Art and Design in
Churchill, Australia, and Mushashino Art University in Tokyo, Japan, with
recent exhibitions in Nashville and St. Louis. Guen is an Assistant Professor of
Studio Arts program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Co-sponsored by the UIS Visual Arts Gallery, UIS Gender & Sexuality Student
Services, & UIS Women’s Center