"Due to the elasticity of the fabric, the stitched lines between swatches bend and warp as they are pulled both horizontally and vertically from the stretching process.
The wavering of Sunset Boulevard’s lines recalls Sara Ahmed’s book Queer Phenomenology, in which she writes: 'The question is not so much finding a queer line but rather asking what our orientation toward queer moments of deviation will be. If the objects slip away, if its face becomes inverted, if it looks odd, strange, or out of place, what will we do?'
To this extent, Arao’s work doesn’t so much contain a 'queer line,' rather, it acts as an invitation to an audience to become queer, to accept queerness, or to engage queerly when confronted with a line that deviates from the hard-edged (i.e. straight, in all of its connotations) abstraction from which it swerves."
Read on Southwest Contemporary
April 4, 2023
