Untitled (Books) | John Q.

Special Residency
Written By Elsewhere Living Museum & Artist Residency
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For Untitled (Books), John Q created a running list of events and their associated dates that ring the upper register of the library. Texts and dates are drawn from inscriptions found in Elsewhere’s collection of books that point to the lives of the former book owners, as well as from memories of life events that took place at Elsewhere culled from staff and the contributing artists’ own lives.

The work is meant to change over time as significant life events take place in the museum and new memories are made. To facilitate this change, John Q left behind a new inscription in a book they found during their stay. In the appropriately titled, “The Q Document” they penned a contract for the work, which guides future iterations of the piece and the means of its display in Elsewhere and other institutional contexts. Untitled (Books) extends the aesthetic and political strategies of Félix GonzálezTorres, whose works frequently meshed narratives of cultural and institutional histories with individual memories.

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John Q
John Q

John Q is an idea collective whose name references “John Q. Public.” The “public” is left understood, though the work is considered a kind of public scholarship, and the “Q” is left hanging to reference the group’s interest in queer history and politics. The collective consists of Wesley Chenault, Andy Ditzler, and Joey Orr. John Q has been funded by Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue (New York) and has participated in the 2012 National Queer Arts Festival at the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco.

Joey Orr holds an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is an ABD Arts and Sciences Fellow at Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts. His dissertation, Practicing the Past: Socially Engaged Remembering in Contemporary Art, looks at cooperative memorial practices at the intersection of memory studies and art history. The study includes a practice component in the context of the collective, John Q, of which he is a founding member. Joey also currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal for Artistic Research (Bern, Switzerland). Past projects have been reviewed by Art Papers, Art in America, ARTnews, Contemporary (UK), Public Art Review and Sculpture magazine, among others.

Wesley Chenault is a certified archivist and head of special collections and archives at Virginia Commonwealth University’s James Branch Cabell Library. His interests in memory, place, and identity take forms as diverse as collection development, exhibitions, public art, teaching, and traditional scholarship. Chenault’s work on Atlanta LGBTQ archives, history, and memory includes the book Gay and Lesbian Atlanta; public artworks, exhibits, and publications with idea collective John Q; and exhibitions at the Atlanta History Center and online through OutHistory.org. He holds a PhD in American studies from the University of New Mexico and a MA in women’s studies from Georgia State University. 

Elsewhere Project | Untitled (Books)

Elsewhere Living Museum & Artist Residency
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