Halloween opening party for "Queer Paranormal"

OPEN TO PUBLIC | Queer Paranormal (an exhibition concerning Shirley Jackson and The Haunting of Hill House) presents a range of artistic practices “haunted” by historical, political and sexual difference. The exhibition is curated by Two Chairs (Jillian Brodie, Cindy Smith and Rachel Stevens) and features artists Peggy Ahwesh, APRIORI (techno-botanical coven), Anna Campbell, Tony Do, Lana Lin, Susan MacWilliam, Senem Pirler, Macon Reed, Zoe Walsh and Sasha Wortzel.

Taking Jackson’s novel and its 1963 film version as jumping-off points, the exhibition identifies queerness in themes including witchcraft, the uncanny the stranger, and the haunted house as undiscovered country and object of desire. Site-specifically located in North Bennington, where Jackson wrote The Haunting of Hill House, Queer Paranormal installs artworks in locations across the Bennington campus, including the Jennings music building—a former mansion said to have partly influenced Jackson’s portrait of Hill House. Works in mediums including painting, sculpture, film, video and sound are spectral in their subject matter and in some instances positioned to otherworldly effect, such as pieces by Pirler and Wortzel that perform sonic hauntings of everyday spaces.

In conceiving the idea for Queer Paranormal, Two Chairs saw connections between scholarly writing about queerness—specifically, the potential for subversion and social change in thinking and experiences “other” than normal—and the supernatural encounters of the main female characters in Jackson’s novel. The contact between Eleanor, emphatically single, and Theodora, identified as lesbian, takes a queer turn in a scene in which Eleanor reaches out in the night for Theo’s hand only to find that the hand she was gripping was an apparition manifested by Hill House. In their exhibition statement, Two Chairs writes: “Jackson has provided a masterful ghost story that embodies for us what José Esteban Muñoz, in Cruising Utopia, characterizes as the way something 'might represent a mode of being and feeling that was then not quite there but nonetheless an opening.’”

Also significant to the curators is the writing of feminist film theorist Patricia White and her essay “Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter: The Haunting,” which addresses the 1963 film adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House. Usdan Gallery is delighted to bring White to campus on November 5 for a lecture about her scholarship and its relationship to Queer Paranormal themes. Other events include a joint screening on November 19 with artists Ahwesh and MacWilliam, followed by a conversation moderated by filmmaker and Bennington visual arts faculty Mariam Ghani.

Queer Paranormal is made possible in part with support from Culture Ireland.