Captives of Heartbr(ache): A Critics Page Discussion

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. is an artist who uses photography to explore representation through privacy and fiction. Occasionally, the work turns away from standard archival prints to examine photography as a sculptural, redactive, and site-specific process. He has completed residencies at Fire Island Artist Residency and Abrons Art Center in New York, St. Roch Community Church in Louisiana, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. He is a 2022 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Photography and received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant in 2019. Brown received his BFA in Photography from New York University and is a Part-Time Lecturer in Photography at The New School. He is represented by Nicelle Beauchene in New York and is based throughout New York.

An artist-theorist and historian, Jill H. Casid holds the appointment of Professor of Visual Studies in the Departments of Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Casid is bringing to completion Doing Things with Being Undone in the Necrocene, the first part of a two-book project on Form at the Edges of Life. Casid is the author of Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minnesota, 2005), Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minnesota, 2015) which is in Spanish translation (Metales Pesados, 2022), and the co-edited collection Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Yale, 2014). Casid’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the steirischerherbst ’23 in Graz.

Sean Fader is currently an Assistant Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in the Department of Photography and Imaging. Fader received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, his MA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and his BFA from the New School in New York City. Fader’s work Insufficient Memory was purchased by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and is currently touring in Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art. Fader is represented by Brigitte Mulholland in Paris.

Andrea Geyer is a multi-disciplinary artist engaging queer methodologies in un-sensing the construction and politics of time. Her lens-based works activate the lingering potential of specific events, places, or biographies to materialize the entanglement of presence and absence due to ideologically motivated omissions in archives and memories. Exhibitions include: MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art; IMMA in Dublin; TATE Modern in London; Generali Foundation, Secession in Vienna; Witte De White in Rotterdam; Sao Paulo Biennal and documenta12/ Kassel. Forthcoming in 2024 Gropiusbau, Berlin and Leslie Lohman Museum, New York. She is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and the Associate Professor of New Genres at Parsons Fine Arts.

Wendy Lotterman is a postdoctoral researcher in literature at the University of Oslo and an associate editor of Parapraxis, a magazine psychoanalysis and politics. A Reaction to Someone Coming In was published by Futurepoem in 2023. Other writing can be found at futurefeed, BOMB, the Chicago Review, and the Poetry Foundation.

Mev Luna is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at Parsons School of Design, The New School. They are a research-based artist whose practice spans performance, installation, video, new media, and text. Through an autoethnographic/anti-ethnographic methodology, their work considers issues of institutional access, incarceration, and how images of marginalized groups are circulated and controlled. Recent exhibitions include the solo, Warped Terrain, at LaNao Galería in Mexico City, and the group exhibition Empathy Fatigue at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago. Luna’s time-based works have premiered at SFMOMA (San Francisco), The Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago), Kino Moviemento (Berlin), and elsewhere. They are a 2023-24 Mellon Faculty Fellow at The New School.

Brooklyn-based art writer Cassie Packard is particularly interested in networks and worlding. She holds a MA in Art History from University College London and a BA in Art History from Brown University. Her writing appears in publications including ArtReview, BOMB, Bookforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Cultured, e-flux, Financial Times, frieze, Interview, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Ursula, as well as in various exhibition catalogues and monographs. She is the author of Art Rules (Frances Lincoln, 2023) and the recipient of critical writing fellowships at Momus and Recess.

Rachel Stern is a New York-based photographer whose work considers the intersections of beauty and power. With a constructivist approach she uses in-camera techniques to create transformative images. Her current project One Should Not Look At Anything was recently exhibited at Baxter St. and published as a catalogue by MATTE Editions.

Le’Andra LeSeur is an artist whose work delves into the celebration of Blackness, queerness, and femininity. Through her work, LeSeur seeks to dismantle systems of power and provide her audience with an opportunity to contemplate themes such as identity, grief, and how the experience of invisibility and debility exist within the frameworks of our day-to-day lives. LeSeur has received several notable awards including the Tulsa Artist Fellowship (2024-2026) and the Leslie-Lohman Museum Artists Fellowship (2019), among others. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at LMCC, NY; The Shed, NY; Atlanta Contemporary; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, and others. Her work is in the collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva is a New York based art historian specializing in queer art and culture. She holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a dissertation on art, AIDS, and lesbian identity in the United States. Soboleva is currently working on a book project titled Friendship as a Way of Art: Queer Identity and Visual Citation, and co-editing (with Svetlana Kitto) the first major publication on the lesbian gallery Trial Balloon. Her writings have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, Ursula Magazine, as well as various exhibition catalogues and artist monographs. She teaches at the New School and NYU.