The Unsettlements: Moms

JD Pluecker

August 21 – November 7, 2023

Reception

August 23, 5 – 7 PM

LECTURE

NOVEMBER 7, 12:30 PM

JCM 2121

Begun in 2018, The Unsettlements is a series of engagements, relations, installations, books, and performances that delve into sites of memory, silence, and ancestry, particularly in the lands now referred to as Texas, locations where eight generations of JD Pluecker's primarily German settler-colonial family have lived since the early nineteenth century. The project rummages through geography, family, and historical narratives with all of their unreliability and surprise. It is envisioned as a 12-year attempt to imagine ways of unsettling genealogical claims, of grounding beyond white nationalism, and of challenging white supremacy and heterosexism. The project also thinks about lineage in terms of queer family-making, how queer/trans organizing, benevolence, and embodiment are also legacies passed down across generations. The Unsettlements is a series of on-going activities, rituals, investigations, creations, and writings that will continue and find new iterations over time.

In this installation at Texas State Galleries, artist JD Pluecker presents the second iteration of The Unsettlements: Moms, a project that began in 2022 at Artpace in San Antonio. At Texas State, the installation has become a space of meditation, listening, attention-giving, and reading, an opportunity to physically traverse the array of materials found and objects produced so far through the artist’s investigation into the lives and legacies of Claire D. Pluecker, their birth mom, and Linda L. Anderson, their adoptive dyke mom. The exhibition consists of a ground level installation of objects from a variety of sites of historical relevance to their birth mother and books from their lesbian mom. In the air elevated above the base layer, we find embroidered pieces by the artist with assistance from their godmother, Barbara Ann Dielman, and other vintage, embroidered works by the two moms. The walls serve as the third layer of the installation with ink-drawn visual poems, which have emerged from archival research and conversations with both mothers; these visual poems will eventually become a book object for The Unsettlements: Moms. This new installation revisits materials and unearths the complicated lives of these two women, as the artist reckons with the legacies of white supremacy and the wonders of queerness and femininity in the same space and time. The installation as a whole forms one large collection of poems, which are visual, material (with objects), linguistic, textual, sonic and ephemeral.

RESOURCES

Want more? Consider watching a lengthier 1-hour “Conversation on Lesbian Herstories & Archives” produced during Pluecker’s residency at Artpace, where the first iteration of The Unsettlements: Moms was on view from November 17, 2022–January 8, 2023.