CLYDE PETERSEN
NAÏVE MELODY
J. Rinehart Gallery is thrilled to announce exhibition, Naïve Melody, a collection of new work from Northwest artist Clyde Petersen. This collection of limited-edition serigraphs features lyrics, poems, and prose accompanying hand-drawn images and photographs by Petersen and local collaborators. In Naïve Melody, Petersen searches for a home, hidden somewhere between collective queer history and individual memory.
Naïve Melody will be on view online and in the Gallery June 29 – July 23, 2024. A Preview Reception will be held Saturday, June 29, from 2-4pm accompanied by a live performance by Petersen’s band, Your Heart Breaks, with special guest, cellist Lori Goldston.
A Public Opening Reception will be held on the Second Thursday (as 1st Thursday falls on Independence Day), July 11, 2024, from 5-8pm.
Clyde Petersen (they/he) is a transgender Northwest artist, working in film, animation, music, installation, and fabulous spectacle. He re-creates lost worlds and documents queer culture that has been largely erased by AIDS, capitalism and gentrification. He works to offer alternate, more equitable realities and futures through the reexamination of overlooked histories of queer communities. His work is slow and patient, gathering new oral histories and building scale-model worlds to tell stories in.
With Naïve Melody, Clyde brings a deep personal history to this examination of a wider queer history with anecdotes about his own childhood and awkward teen years, and the moments he looks back on as those that shaped his understanding of queer history, the legacy of his queer elders, his place in that history, and ultimately a better understanding of himself.
Clyde has been honored with the first Amazon Artist in Residency Grant in 2018, The Cornish College of the Arts prestigeous Neddy Award, The Stranger Genius Award, the Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award among many others. His films have been screened at the Ottawa Int. Animation Festival, SIFF, SXSW, Georama: Tokyo Animation Film Festival, London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Walker Art Gallery, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle Art Gallery, PuSh: Vancouver, Bumbershoot, TWIST: Seattle Queer Film Festival, University British Columbia and the IFC Film Channel.
In 2019, Clyde founded The Fellow Ship Artist Residency, a paid residency for queer and BIPOC artists to spend a week on Guemes Island in the Salish Sea. He lives in a wooden boat on land on Guemes Island, works on films, and runs the residency space.
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Naïve Melody
Exhibition Statement
Naïve Melody is a collection of new work from Northwest artist Clyde Petersen. This collection of limited-edition serigraphs features lyrics, poems, and prose accompanying hand-drawn images and photographs by Petersen and local collaborators. In Naïve Melody, Petersen searches for a home, hidden somewhere between collective queer history and individual memory.