Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin head west to explore same-sex relationships in follow-up to “A Marriage: 1 (Suburbia)”
A MARRIAGE: 2 (WEST-ER)
Invisible Dog Art Center
51 Bergen St.
March 8 – April 12
www.theinvisibledog.org
www.nickandjakestudio.com
Last spring, married multimedia artists Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin staged “A Marriage: 1 (Suburbia)” at HERE downtown, delving into the American Dream in the twenty-first century through language, video, sculpture, literature, cut maps, and live performance. “Even growing up in a hyperliberal place,” Jake told twi-ny last spring, “I had a sense of gay people as being abnormal – a deviance from the norm that are tolerated because Berkeleyites are tolerant and open-minded people, but still a group of people who are in some way going to have to live on the outside of mainstream society. As many things about gay culture have been accepted into the mainstream since we were kids, now that set of aspirations that were traditionally exclusively for heterosexuals, aspirations towards suburbia, the nuclear family, and all of that – are on the table.” The third part of Nick and Jake’s continuing series heads out west for “A Marriage: 2 (West-er),” running at the Invisible Dog in Brooklyn through April 12. In the show, they reference Scottish adventurer Sir William Drummond Stuart, Hollywood hunk John Wayne, and partners Robert Campbell and William Sublette as they investigate homosexuality and social mores across the vast frontier. Their preparation took them to such states as Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, and Colorado as they incorporated their own relationship into the narrative as well. The exhibit will be open Thursdays through Saturdays from 1:00 to 7:00 and Sundays till 5:00, with daily durational actions in addition to artist talks on March 25 and April 8 at 6:00. The opening reception takes place March 8 from 6:00 to 10:00, while closing day, April 12, will feature a live spray performance.