BERTW2W

Hand crocheted, assorted fibers. Exhibited in "...I Forgot to Laugh: Humor and Contemporary Art."

Wells Chandler’s brightly-colored crochet “drawings” present a joyfully radical portrait of queerness. Chandler’s playful “Cowboi” figures queer traditional stereotypes of the American West in almost every conceivable way. Many of the typically hyper-masculine cowboy characters bear mastectomy scars. Others are rendered ambiguous through deliberate cropping of their bodies. By utilizing an art-form commonly associated with femininity and domesticity, Chandler positions his whimsical cast of characters even further from the norm.

For Chandler, the word queer refers to individuals who have a non-normative relationship to their body, gender, and/or sexuality. Chandler draws a connection between the origins of the word queer and his medium of choice. Queer derives from the root “twerkw” which means twisted. Chandler explains, “That root is referenced in the process of crochet which involves twisting lines and in the depiction of the bodies I make which are literally twisted or contorted physically and conceptually."