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Jack Finerty
on
Queer Identity
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Do you purposely choose to keep your work out of the digital realm, or do you just not find it necessary
to advertise your art on the internet?
eah, I mean it’s a conscious decision in a sense - I’ve never been good at social media, ever
since I was like 13, when facebook exploded, it’s never been intuitive to me: interacting with
people online, even with messaging. I think it’s kinda deliberate - I understand what’s useful and
valuable about those things, I have a lot of friends who get a lot of work out through instagram,
promote a lot of stuff on these platforms, and I get that, but I’m not comfortable with it.
Y
Perhaps it has something to do with wanting your art to stay within community (in this case queer)
bounds? (since it can be controversial). Does being low-key add something to your work?
art of what I’m working on right now cam e out of a piece of writing that I did—I’m an art
history student and I was working on a kind of pseudo-sociology project about online hook-
up culture, and I was using that to write about internet culture and new media more generally. I
was writing in the wake of the election in the USA and the discussions about corners of the web
and these algorithmic echo chambers that followed. Part of what I was interested in doing was
not criticizing those things or criticizing the way that people engage with media right now, but
trying to think about what could be productive about those scenes. So if I’m trying to contain
these [performances] to a local community, I want it to be something that you are involved in in
some physical way.
P
We sat down with resi-
dent artist Jack to talk
about obscure corners of
human nature and invent-
ing new vocabulary for
talking about it. Gender,
sex, queerness, identity,
art and
everything in between.
Nuotraukos Emilijos Filipenkovaitės
Do you make active decisions regarding your appearance to make your identity (not obvious but)
appaerent/noticeable ?
eah, I mean, I like fashion and part of my work is that I make clothing. They’re not super func-
tional, but I like clothes and I like playing with clothes and the way that I dress, so that’s just
one element. It’s this fun thing, but I’ve had a lot of trouble with gender roles. I went to an all boys
school in London and that was a pretty wack experience, so you know, there is a kind of political
element to it.
Y
Being active in showing your appearance is still
kinda alien in Lithuania, it might not be a huge deal
for people in USA. Do you aim to challenge gender
norms or does it come naturally?
eah I guess I do to an extent. I grew up
wearing women’s clothing until the age of
about 10, 11, and I was pretty fluid with the way
that I dressed. I was lucky that my parents were
relatively supportive of that. Definitely part of it
is, when you dress a certain way you get resis-
tance to that. And when you get resistance like
that it can be difficult to not want to push back
against it. So there is something deliberate
about it, but it comes naturally. I’m not going
to be like, “I’m gonna fuck with gender now”.
Y
Since we’re speaking about identity, and queer
identity is obviously a big part of your work, is art a
tool for you to explore your (not necessarily sexual)
identity or rather a way to get some point across
to the public, bring certain taboo topics such as
drugs and sex into the wider conversation? Maybe
both?
think so, it is. Especially if it’s something like
this specific topic.
I
With queer iden-
tity, there is this
weird thing
where in some
way
that’s an iden-
tity that people
think affects
your entire life
and defines ev-
erything, but
at the same time
it’s sort of con-
tained
in just this one
thing.