A Queer Family (2020)
Red neon on welded aluminium structure
850x950 mm

A Queer Family consists of two characters from popular culture: Keith Haring’s barking dog drawing and Rosie-the-Robot from the sci-fi cartoon the Jetsons. This work explores how these two figures are both in fact representations of the outcast, the marginal, and the other. 

 

Keith Haring’s dog has its roots in NYPD’s K-9 dogs and the stray dogs of NYC. The former were used as tools for surveillance in urban regeneration and racial segregation. The latter were highly stigmatized by the public just like the LGBT communities, druggies and AIDS victims were at the time. (Fiona Anderson, Dogs of the World Unite)

 

Rosie-the-Robot is an ex-military machine that was designed to supervise and invade; turned into a cybernetic slave, a proto-Alexa, a woman, a maid, a migrant worker among a white-washed community, a glitch within an otherwise frictionless futuristic scenario. 

 

Borrowing from Donna Haraway’s Cyborg and Companion Species manifestos, this coupling of dog and robot can be seen as a monument for cross-gender, cross-race, and cross-species alliances where partiality polyvocality and is celebrated and not erased in the name of anthropocentrism, heteronormativity, and ultimately totality. 

 

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Exhibited as part of Family of Things at are projects  with the generous support of SAHA Foundation.