Topher Lineberry is a multidisciplinary artist whose work often uses historical and archival material in conjunction with speculative proposals. Lineberry’s work fuses prequel and sequel into a queer space of becoming. Most recently, this mode of working has taken a sculptural turn, creating a miniature world of architectural models and maquettes which flirt with, refuse, and talk back to art historical categories forcefully grafted onto the American South such as “outsider art,” “folk art,” and handicrafts. Flat free-standing images occupy this miniature world, which were traced and altered from drawings by the artist’s grandmother, Helen Lineberry, who drew them in 1929 as a 10 year-old in the Appalachian Mountains. Using family and kin as a platform of investigation, Topher Lineberry advances a project they term “kinstitutional critique” into a site of critical “kinstitution building.”

Kinstitution: A Topia Between Archive and Proposal

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