Shame's Glove

2009-2013; Twelve SX-70 Polaroids, Impossible Project film, embossed vintage chrome and leather SX-70 Polaroid camera body and leather carrying case. Installation. Dimensions variable.

Text engraved on chrome plate:

“Pride and shame are different interlinings of the same glove.” Shame’s glove is the flamboyant sartorial figure of the dandies, flaneurs, and their ghost practitioners in ongoing efforts at the style-is-everything and life-is-art imperatives. Shame’s glove is the molten feel and everyday creative process of what the late queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick movingly portrayed as the fold of shame. Taking off the glove to put on the gauntlet of everyday survival acts of striptease, queer femininity and its charged exposures unfold as they implicate taking, looking, and becoming in the photograph as a charged and unpredictable place of encounter. The fold of shame is a technology of the self that makes its way through the folds of the accordion pleats of the camera body, the hinges of the chrome and leather case, the dial turns of the performing lens, and the self-developing textures of the film. The fold of shame is a tool of affective bonds touched off through the unfolds of the first folding single-lens reflex camera: the SX-70 Polaroid, that swinging camera of intimate, analogue exchange and promised immediacy—right here, right now. 

Exhibited in Wisconsin Triennial, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, September 2013-January 2014.

Read interview: Karin Wolf, “Queered Time,” Our Lives (March 1, 2014).