Press release

Sharon Hayes
‘An Army of Lovers Cannot Lose’
3 March – 10 April 2021, Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles and Tanya Leighton, Berlin

Tanya Leighton is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by Sharon Hayes in Los Angeles at Kristina Kite Gallery. ‘An Army of Lovers Cannot Lose’ features Sharon Hayes’s newest edition of her ‘Ricerche’ project, ‘Ricerche: two’ which continues her ongoing interest in how intimate speech can also be political speech, and the interplay between one’s individual subjectivity and the sense of belonging to a group.

Sharon Hayes’s evolving Ricerche project, composed of multiple video works examining gender, sexuality and contemporary collective identifications is made in dialogue with ‘Comizi d’amore’ (1964), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s documentary on sex and relations. Hayes adapts the structure of ‘Comizi d’amore’ using the format of the group interview to interrogate notions of identity, affinity and difference among individuals who are bound together by choice and circumstance. Hayes’s interviews with different groups specifically examine non-heteronormative family structures and non-binary gender identifications and build a living archive of voices on the challenges of owning one’s identity – conversations with a radical, transformative potential.

In ‘Ricerche: two’ (2020) Hayes talks to players from two US women’s tackle football teams – the Arlington Impact and the Dallas Elite Mustangs. Following her commitment to interviewing people in groups, Hayes assembles 22 players to discuss their relationship with the sport, what role gender plays on the field and off, and the sport’s impact on how they see themselves as athletes, mothers, daughters, workers, citizens, and sexual and romantic partners. The camera catches laughter, attentive listening, raised eyebrows, sideways glances, clapping, nodding, and hums of agreement or dissent, demonstrating the constant negotiations of trust, empathy, difference, and shared purpose. Filmed at close range in early 2020 just before the pandemic took hold, the women form a collective body, casually touching—a uniquely charged dynamic in an era of social distancing. The wide curved projection screen was designed by Hayes to evoke the containment of a huddle.

Presented alongside the video, Hayes’s silkscreened prints titled ‘WOMEN’ (2015) are taken from an image of a banner carried in the Women's Strike for Equality that took place across the U.S. on August 26th, 1970. The banner read “WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITE!”. Hayes singles out the word “women” and prints each letter individually to the approximate scale of the original banner. The material transformation of the individual letters alters the original's legibility and seemingly straightforward declaration of meaning. In the gallery, only the ‘W’ and ‘E’ are displayed, bringing into question the fragility of collective identification as well as the failure of ‘woman’ to ever be a unifying, collective ‘we’.

The exhibition continues in the rear gallery space with ‘Ricerche: one’ (2019). In this video diptych, Hayes gathered groups of children and begins by asking the question: “Where do babies come from?” Shot over one week in Provincetown, MA, all of the participants in Hayes’s video are the children of queer or gender-nonconforming parents. The work is composed of interviews with two age groups: 5-8 year-olds and young adults. Similar to those in Pasolini’s interviews, the young children on-screen produce delightfully fragmented answers that mix imagination, fantasy, and words repeated from things adults have said to them. The young adults on the opposite screen are deeply experienced with the narrative of their families and their births, having had to account for them repeatedly over the two or three decades of their lives. These encounters address complex family formations and the role of kids in the evolving political landscape of queerness in the U.S.

The newest works in the exhibition are Hayes’s textile banners ‘What Do We Want’, ‘When Will This End?’ and ‘The Time is Now’ (2021). Facing the wall, these banners are hung back to front to inverse its slogan, which bleeds through the fabric. Scraps of The New York Times articles that the artist has been collecting over the past year, presumably used as a drop cloth during the banner’s making, remain stuck to the paint on what is now the front of the banner. These works draw inspiration from an ERA YES banner that Hayes came across in an archival box in the Tamiment Collection in New York. The errant fragments of newspaper both ground the historicity of the banners and disturb it. While the slogans of the banners “appear” again and again over decades of collective protest, the snippets of recent news fix the time as that of “now”. Stuck together but also at odds, the two sides of the banner surface the tensions, pains and pleasures in acting urgently against recurring tides of hatred, violence, inaction, and catastrophe.

Artist Talk

Watch a recorded conversation between Sharon Hayes and artist Nicole Miller about ‘An Army of Lovers Cannot Lose’.

Credits

‘Ricerche: two’ Participating Players from Arlington Impact, Division I, Women’s Football Alliance (WFA): Charise “CJ” Blacksher, Epiphany Carroll, Alaydrain Cofer, Chandra Collier, Ken Gabriel, Pareishia “Gym Shoes” Green, Bethany Lartigue, Brittany Myers, D’Angela Marie “Deezy” Ricks, Kim Rose, Tara Thomas, Courtnei “Luckey” Townson, Tatanisha “Tito” Young

Participating Players from Dallas Elite Mustangs, Division I, Women’s Football Alliance (WFA): Erika Bobo, Arebria Burr, Tatum Curtis, Tiara Darby, Cheyenne Gutierrez, Yazmin Lopez, Titiana Smith, Alexias Stricklin, Kesz Wesley

Production Team: Director of Photography: Michelle Lawler Production Manager: Althea M. Rao Outreach Coordinator: Jackie Soro Camera: Sean Lyons Sound Recorder: Leslie Francis Key Grip: David Lynn Additional Grip: Prentice Branzet, Lonnie Butts DIT: Kyle Novak Still Photographer: Rolando Sepulveda II Production Assistants: Gabriella Mykal Smith, Alex Sigtenhorst

‘Ricerche: two’ was co-commissioned by Common Guild and for the collaborative exhibition project, Commonwealth, by Beta-Local; the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia, and Philadelphia Contemporary.

'Ricerche: one’ Interviewees, five to eight-year-olds: Meryl Scholfield, Finley Scholfield, Tristan Sylvestre-Margolis, Shane Pierson, Ella Craghead-Goldman, Jillian Nichols, Winter Collins, Orion Akash Phelps, Dylan Sumner, Benjamin Braden- Forge, Ella Herwick-Poutre, Noemi Herwick-Poutre, Elise Inkster, Layne Joheim, Christian Wells Baylis-Gaba, Grayson McFerrin Hogan, Grayson McSweeney, Taylor Andrepont-Aycock, Tatum Andrepont-Aycock, Abby Boscher-Walsh, Ethan Boscher-Walsh, Guiliana M. Palmieri, Natalia Reichbach-Soto, Sophie Pennock Collins, Rosie Carioti-Darling, Elizabeth Davis

Interviewees, young adults/adults: Brooke Albers, Jordan Polcyn-Evans, Angel Martin, Kerry Cullen, Jamie Lee Bergeron-Beamon, Robin Marquis, Ryan Kenji Keone Kuramitsu, Elijah Martin, Emmet Dupont, Malina Simard-Halm, Devan Wells, Jacob Polcyn-Evans, Dominik Doemer, Courtney Faria, Ash Lumpkin

Production Team: Director of Photographer/Cameraperson: Martina Radwan Production Manager: Lala Drew Sound Recorder: EE Miller Sound Mix: Josh Allen

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