Ace Lehner Lunchtime Lecture

Ace Lehner is a grad from CCA who gave a lunchtime lecture last month. (One neat thing I learned is that CCA offers a program which allows you to leave with both an MA and an MFA in three years—which is what Lehner is doing). Lehner’s early work was preoccupied with making multi-faceted portraits of people using themselves composited several times in the frame in order to show their relationships with their various selves.

Some themes of Lehner’s later work:
-femme invisibility
-“queer failure”, failing/making things messed up on purpose as an expression of queerness
-the uncertainty of queer bodies: how it is harder to glean meanings from them

Lehner was also hoping to explore “the queer tomboy gaze” with work that consisted mostly of an exploration of her relationship with her girlfriend. This work brought up questions of how the queer tomboy gaze visually differs (or doesn't differ) from the historically hetero male gaze of the female body. To respond to that concern in some of the pieces, she put up barriers between the viewer and the female-bodied subject, for example a foggy shower door.