The Double Feature Lecture Series is an evening of presentations pairing two creative practitioners: scientists, visual artists, performers, musicians, writers, farmers, business people, community workers, activists or academics. Mess Hall invites a single presenter who in-turn invites an additional speaker to join them on the same night. The second presenter may be a friend, acquaintance or stranger whose work could be related thematically, formally, or by technical or creative process.
Wednesday, May 18th from 7:00 – 9:00 PM
Jesse Harrod and Brian Barr
Jesse Harrod
The Canadian Tuxedo and Other Queer Moments
Harrod will discuss the history of denim, Levis in particular, the relationship of levis and denim with class, production and gender alongside her own personal relationship with this garment and coming out.
Jesse Harrod has an MFA from the department of Material Studies from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University.
She has been writing and making work that employs traditional and contemporary craft and sculptural practices with a focus on craft as “other” and how this pertains to queer theory as well as second and third wave feminism. Jesse is interested in working with the layers that exist within the history of cloth and fabric. Those layers include, class, colonization, trade, puberty, and domesticity.
Jesse Harrod
The Canadian Tuxedo and Other Queer Moments
Brian Barr
Music, Muscle Cars and Manufacturing: The Culture of Masculinity in the Motor City
Barr will examine the culture of masculinity that is ever present in the Motor City as well as how this may have contributed to the demise of a major American industrial center. In this brief historical exploration of Detroit and its decline, Barr will address his own work as it has been inspired and shaped by this culture as well as point out the seeds of hope that are alive and well in Detroit as it rethinks itself and its future. The first Post-Industrial American City has incredible potential to become the largest small town in the nation; a creative capital and a locally sustainable community built by small business, artists and creative professionals and a shared vision for how to reshape failed American Cities.
Brian Barr (MFA, American University, Washington, DC) lives and works in Detroit, MI, where he teaches drawing and painting for the College for Creative Studies. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the 2009 Windsor Biennial at The Art Gallery of Windsor in Canada, the 2006 Biennial: Contemporary American Realism at The Fort Wayne Museum of Art and Re:Vision at The Katzen Museum in Washington, D.C.. This summer his work will be featured in New American Paintings NO. 95, Midwest Edition.