Anna Campbell, Dress Rehearsal for a Dream Sequence
May 1 – June 12, 2022
Opening Sunday, May 1, 5-9pm

Associative Exhibition Tour with Heather Lynn Johnson
Sundays, June 5 and 12 at 4pm

With public programming and an accessible web project on participantafterdark.art
Curated by Dominika Tylcz, Hana Halilaj, Claire Sammut, Eugenia Braniff, and Sofia D’Amico, members of the Second Year Curatorial Module at CCS Bard.

From May 1 – June 12, 2022, PARTICIPANT INC presents Anna Campbell, Dress Rehearsal for a Dream Sequence, a site-responsive sculptural installation and the most recent iteration of a cumulative body of dream sequences that began with Apparatus for a Dream Sequence (2018) and Prototype for a Dream Sequence (2020). Dress Rehearsal, like much of Campbell’s diverse research-based practice, employs props, scaffold, and trusswork to support models of representation for queer forms that challenge the gaze of classifying taxonomies. This critique bonded to the dreamwork of fantasy via form, space, and ephemera resists the social dynamics that reinforce our constructions of what may be understood as aspirational. Appropriated and abstracted references to domestic spaces, gay bars, and other more provisional architectures work to poach key signifiers of gender- and hetero-normativity and open them onto new attachments of possibility and desire from what might seem otherwise to be static and constrictive legacies.

The exhibition is accompanied by a broadside poster with a poem by Oliver Baez Bendorf and the publication, In the Glitter Mines, texts by Aaminah Shakur and Matt Morris — both printed by Issue Press.

Over the course of the exhibition, in cooperation with Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Second Year Curatorial Module, Dominika Tylcz, Hana Halilaj, Claire Sammut, Eugenia Braniff, and Sofia D’Amico will organize public programming comprised of a series of talks and a website that are envisioned to be closely interconnected through our digital platform Participant After Dark.

Associative Tour is an imaginative walkthrough of the exhibition, led by Heather Lynn Johnson, that avoids conventional methods of analysis and instead is based on free-floating associations, sparks of intuition, and poetic resonances. Johnson, herself an artist, poet and researcher, draws from her experience at various museum archives to attune it with the queer structures of support proposed by Anna Campbell in Dress Rehearsal for a Dream Sequence. In response to the highly evocative sculptures by Campbell and following the histories signaled by the works’ rich references, Johnson envisions spaces of queer support and preservation beyond the normative institutional mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.

Support for the exhibition and Anna Campbell, In the Glitter Mines was provided by the University of Wisconsin – Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the Vilas Associates Award and the Edna Welchers Arts in Wisconsin Award. With thanks to Esther Cho for her fabrication work as the Research Assistant for this project in 2021-2022.

Safety protocols: Visitors and staff must wear a mask and practice social distancing.