The Work of Love, The Queer of Labor @ Franklin Street Artworks

Franklin Street Works newest exhibition, "The Work of Love, The Queer of Labor," is curated by New York City based artist/curator Yevgeniy Fiks and curator/critic Olga Kopenkina. In "The Work of Love, The Queer of Labor," queerness is discussed through the lens of class and vice versa. Exhibiting artists are: Angela Beallor, Hugo Gellert, Montague Glover, Noam Gonick, Hagra, William E. Jones, Erik Moskowitz+Amanda Trager, Jaanus Samma, and YES! Association / Föreningen JA!. The exhibition is on view through August 17, 2017.

In "The Work of Love, The Queer of Labor," individual artists and collectives contribute works that represent a desire for liberation through critically engaged connections between class, gender and sexuality. LGBTQI identities are explored from the class perspective in order to re-discover political potentialities in queerness' countercultural paradigm. By exploring queerness through its relationship with class, curators Fiks and Kopenkina aim to interrogate the possibility of love in a class-based society. They attempt as well to envision a classless society akin to "affectionate community" built by LGBTQI people.

In today's global economy the difference between work as a productive force in service of capitalism and labor as a condition of biological life is almost gone. Artists' creative work, once avant-garde and independent, has become alienated and inseparable from market economy. Likewise, love and sexuality have become abstracted from the site of their enactment. They are no longer a product of biological body, but, instead, generated by techno-bodies impacted by multimedia technologies of global capitalist production.

Is it possible for queer activities, which are driven by "true desire," not social norms, to restore love and produce new relationships between people? Could these relationships be based on equality of all forms of sexuality, love and labor? Artists who present their works in this exhibition extend this desire for love and personal relationships in a society built on equality and justice rather than exploitation and oppression to all people. The struggle for queer rights is everyone's struggle!

Franklin Street Works is located on 41 Franklin Street in Stamford. Gallery Hours are: Tues. - Sun. noon to 5 p.m. To sign up for a monthly newsletter on things to do and see, special events and travel tips in Litchfield Hills and Fairfield County visit  www.litchfieldhills.com or www.visitfairfieldcountyct.com