September 2, 2021- September 25, 2021 — Une Sorte De Plaisir Parfait Jasmine Fetterman

September 2 -25, 2021 Opening Reception: Thursday, September 2, 5-8PM
Gallery hours: Saturdays, 12pm-3pm and by appointment. Email specialist.gallery@gmail.com or DM us on instagram (@specialist_sea) for inquiries.

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Specialist presents Une Sorte De Plaisir Parfait, new sculptural and video works by Jasmine Fetterman. In this exhibition, Fetterman explores the complex and fluid nature of identity as a central, universal concept by creating utopic, transformational spaces and glittering, lustrous ceramic objects. Weaving together themes of Western histories, mythology and queer aesthetics, the works in Une Sorte De Plaisir Parfait create a malleable, shifting and playful world, a space of possibility that Fetterman dubs ‘queer architecture.’ Within this world, hierarchies of gender and class are questioned, while the politics of the queer body in relation to space play out in hyper-color.
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Jasmine Fetterman uses a multi-disciplinary and research based approach to explore the complex and fluid nature of identity as a universal concept throughout humanity. As an Eastern European, first generation American, they reference themes of western histories, mythologies, and aesthetics to explore politics of the queer body and its relationship to constructed space. Their desire is to create space to include and normalize queer bodies within film, media, and the art world. Focusing on the necessity of a utopic liminal/transformational space that they have labeled as queer architecture, to also question/critique the role of socio-economic class, gender structures, and hierarchies. They have shown around the West Coast, Pacific Northwest and the Southwest, most recently at the Henry Art Gallery in 2021. Fetterman received their MFA from University of Washington, 3D4M, in 2021.

“I am a transgender artist that grew up on the peninsula of Washington. There is a subtle yet undeniable elegance that exists within this landscape that helped shape my understanding of beauty and the world. When I started making art I was continuing a search for something that I had been looking for my whole life. Over the years my work has existed as a place and a framework for me to explore identity and sexuality. The understanding of what this body of work represents has shifted and altered over the years as a fluid, ephemeral thing, changing as my understanding of my identity has grown stronger. I love my family dearly and I have so much gratitude for the way they raised me, but being gay not to mention transgender was something that was not acceptable and was kept hidden from them and myself a lot of my life. As the practice has progressed, more of the secrets that I had held close or didn’t even know I had, were being exposed and released into the world. Culminating at this point within my practice and the end of graduate school as a pretty ridiculous coming out story. I have been reunited with an old self as I begin this second life as Jasmine, or Jazzy as I like to be called.”