Queer Trash Presents: Reagan Holiday

Friday, April 12th, Queer Trash is thrilled to present Madsen Minax, Max Hamel, and Reagan Holiday for an evening of gender blur, noise, abstraction, and intimate electricity. Returning to ISSUE following their 2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship, Queer Trash presents a varied night of drag, noise, and video, with three artists who often come in bodily contact with the technologies they employ.

Madsen Minax presents a new film incorporating live sound and projected video. An interdisciplinary artist whose work is influenced by his participation in justice-oriented communities, Minax’s To Run, To Play Dead queers how intimacy and friendship can unfold between rural boys. The evening also features Max Hamel, known for their prolific output as Head Separating From Body, where the inputs and outputs of their modular synth are switchable, nonbinary, and fluid. Further, the sound is activated by touch, so the artist’s body completes the circuit. Drag performance artist and musician Reagan Holiday performs high femme harsh noise for the apocalypse. Full on, full drag, full volume.

Queer Trash celebrates the potential for noise to be a process that undoes fixed meanings, upsets hierarchies, and collapses socially constructed order. In information and communication theory, noise is the unwanted and inevitable travelling companion of signal. In this definition noise interferes with signal that is considered right and true, and noise itself has no independent meaning. Noise, to Queer Trash, is so much more exciting than that. These artists flip the dominant codes and focus on the noise, the excess, the stuff that’s trash to heteronormative culture. For Queer Trash, noise is totally queer.

Queer theory diva Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick puts it beautifully: “That's one of the things that "queer" can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically.”

Reagan Holiday is a drag performance artist and musician from Brooklyn, NY. They want you to know they definitely didn’t start the rumor about them being the Succubus of Noise, and had nothing to do with it being scrawled in bathrooms throughout NYC. If you’ve picked up that this humor is an effort to deflect attention from the deeply personal and wanting nature of a body of work seeking audience from a world that intends to erase it, thats sick lmao u must brly cool. Now put your earplugs in.