DURHAM – Being both LGBTQIA+ Pride Month and Juneteenth, June held a special meaning for Black queer artists.

Curator, activist and community organizer Angel Dozier, founder of Be Connected Durham, gathered several Black queer artists for “We Set Our Own Terms,” an exhibition at Zeitgeist Bar and Gallery in downtown Durham. The show closed July 11. 

The exhibition rejects compulsory heterosexuality and cisgender normativity; that is, the cultural expectations that our bodies determine our roles in society. When this expectation is disrupted, viewers can then sit with, confront and explore their own feelings and reactions to each piece. 

A Juneteenth open mic night, including drag performers and introductory remarks about the show and BCD, was held at Zeitgeist. Dozier highlighted a few of the show’s pieces to The Tribune. 

In “Sirens of Size,” a series of six large photographs printed on archival Stonehenge cotton paper, photographer and model Chasyn Carter’s portraits challenge viewers, daring them to enter her boudoir. All the shots are flash photography, giving an air of paparazzi photos. 

In one shot, a silk tie is wrapped around the wrists above the head of a Black male model who reclines on a white bedspread, tattoos visible. In another, three Black male models kiss and caress each other on a bed, faces buried deep within each other and obscured from view of the camera. At the foot of the bed sits a plus-sized model in a bra and panties who cocks her head and makes direct eye contact with the viewer. Typically, group sex is often thought of as a form of female degradation and male domination, but this photograph turns that assumption on its head. The series is the inaugural shoot for House of Sparx, a modeling house Carter created specifically for plus-sized models.

Tattoos, fat bodies, piercings, acrylic nails, and dyed hair are all visible, up on a wall for everyone to see. This series expresses a sexuality that exists in a world where shame does not, leaving room only for liberation and freedom. 

An interactive piece, Control.wav, by Jon Copes consists of a mirror and a mp3 player connected to a pair of headphones. Viewers are encouraged to make eye contact with themselves in the mirror, don the headphones and press play. An audio file of a feminine voice stating, “this is all about control, and this time, I’m gonna do it my way,” is chopped and screwed, interspersed between long pauses and repetition of the phrase.

It is unclear whether the experience requires listening to the track to completion. Therefore, one is “teased” by the audio; hoping for something different, but sticking around to see what else they may hear next, being forced to submit their control to an unbranded mp3 player that only weighs a few grams.

Other works depict the freedom to experience pleasure and of self-expression. Adair Carroll’s digital works show figures engaging in pleasure with visible top surgery (a gender-affirming procedure where breast tissue is removed), scars and wearing a collar and leash in an act of “puppy play,” (an adult pretends to be a pet dog of their partner as a sexual fetish).

On an online fundraising page for the exhibition, Dozier writes,

“this work is innovative, community-rooted, interdisciplinary and proven. It is both theory and practice — the continuation of more than a decade of relationship-building, artistic experimentation, civic and public engagement, and cultural strategy designed to move communities toward healing, self-definition, and lasting change while helping cultivate a deeper and more expansive relationship to Juneteenth itself.”

Dozier told The Tribune the exhibition was the “first of an anthology around power and consent.” The show is a combination of the exploration of Blackness, gender and sexuality.

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