Inspired in part by nineteenth-century farm and labor paintings, Cockettes’ Cusp explores the ground between man, land, and spirituality. It is a vision that rides the edge between progress and futility. In these photographs, a series of linked histories are forced together in Utah’s deserted Bonneville Salt Flats. Gerrard Winstanley’s protocommunist agrarian Diggers in England work alongside famed drag queen Hibiscus’s self-marginalized Cockettes, a drag queen theater troupe. The Cockettes were an offshoot of Californian hippies who chose to revive the legacy of the original seventeeth-century Diggers with similar, though not protestant, activist motivations. Framed here, they are vacuum-packed on stage and interdependent in an environment that is tragically devoid, yet abundant with potential for life.

Pooneh Maghazehe

Pooneh Maghazehe was born in Brooklyn and raised in Levittown, Pennsylvania. Select exhibitions include the Beijing 798 Biennale, the Chelsea Art Museum, DePaul University Museum in Chicago, and Asian Contemporary Art Week. Select publications include The New York Times, Art Asia Pacific Magazine, Art Map Magazine, The Washington Post, 1 Magazine, and Adbusters. She is currently artist-in-residence at the ZKM Institute for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Her work was also recently on view with three other artists of Iranian descent at Rossi & Rossi Gallery in London.

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