Opener 3: Nayland Blake:
Some Kind of Love — Performance Video, 1989-2002

Nayland Blake creates performances, videos, sculptures, and drawings that complicate notions of cultural and sexual identity with intellectual rigor and disarming humor. Blake’s performance-based works are often displayed though video; they include works such as Gorge, a documentation of the artist being continually fed for sixty minutes, or Starting Over, in which Blake tries to perform a simple dance in a tremendously heavy bunny suit. In both — and in much of Blake’s other work — the divide between care and punishment becomes blurred as the intricacies of nurturing, intimacy, and submission are exposed. The sculptural installations and performances on view in Some Kind of Love revealed the wide range of Blake’s interests, including imagery from popular culture, the queer body and Camp sensibility, erotic and psychoanalytic texts, and the toxic legacy of American racism.