27 Jun 2018

Bobby Busnach, Katrina Del Mar, Michelle Handelman, John Kelly, Bobby Miller

Art Market Provincetown

Reviewed by Heather Kapplow

AMP's front room is photographic coverage of multiple queer cultures and eras. Bobby Miller captures creative getups modeled at Wigstock playfully and intimately. Katrina Del Mar's confrontational portraits of confrontational women have the eerie quality of a National Geographic spread on an endangered species. Bobby Busnach drops us into a party or three from the 1970s, with an eye for pattern and contrast that keeps the subjects and backgrounds in relentless tension.

AMP's back room is dominated by Michelle Handelman's 63-minute opus Dorian, A Cinematic Perfume (2009/13). Handleman casts present-day drag performers as themselves, reminding that there's no performance without an audience desiring access to something more extreme than their own lives. This question of who most needs queer performativity echoes through both rooms, and is quietly deepened by John Kelly's delicate graphite portraits detailing the loss of gay talent during the peak of the AIDS epidemic.