Roya Amirsoleymani

I try to spread subversion, hoping its contagious qualities might rub off on the quiet and comfortable. That is, I think solidity, comfort, calm, and stability are overrated, and that if we look closer, we see that chaos abounds, that nothing fits its label, that everything can be normal because nothing really is. I use the word "queer" as a verb. I embrace the unfamiliar and uncanny, and I tend to put somewhat overwhelming confidence in theories of social construction and performativity. We are always part of an elaborate production of identity, sexuality, and self. Most importantly, we are driven by desire, and desire has no inherant bounds, only those we permit or produce. Desire unbounded--a global goal.

I graduated from the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies in California with a self-designed major in Space, Image, and Desire: Contemporary Visual Culture, Gender and Sexuality. My primary focus is curatorial work and critical writing on contemporary visual art and film, and how it intersects with feminist, gender, and queer theory. My favorite class was Surrealism, and I wish I'd studied more postcolonial theory. There was a lot of theatre.

I've jumped around: curatorial research with SMoCA; studying contemporary Czech feminist art in Prague; exhibition design with the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art; public relations for a women's short film festival; traveling to, writing about, and presenting on Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "The Gates."

Most recently, I curated "Presence and Performance: Queer-Feminist Bodies" at the Poetic Palette Gallery in Redlands, California, which included photography, sculpture, installation, video, and mixed-media by California and Austin, TX-based artists Corkey Sinks, Kelley Heider, and Val Gilman. This show will next be exhibited in June 2007 at the Femina Potens gallery in San Francisco.

And now: I am the Public Relations Director and a writer for Phoenix Art Space.