A Taste of Honey, A Virtual Exhibition Organized by Hawkfish

In May 1966, two separate productions of the play A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney were staged at the Noble Center auditorium at St. Lawrence University. The play included a gay character (Geoffrey), making it one of the earliest documented examples of queering space at the university. It was notable for being performed during a time same-sex sexual activity between consenting adults was illegal in New York, and homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness in the US. Taking its title directly from the play, the exhibition A Taste of Honey is a body of work that acknowledges, explores, and expands the momentum of queer energy from this moment in history.

Developed, curated, and scheduled by Hawkfish, an international queer art collective, the exhibition is a series of digital interventions that allow Hawkfish to bypass formal systems and queer space on their own terms. The gallery becomes a rip in space and time that allows queer matter to flow in from an unknown queer realm, matter that actively seeks to puncture order, control, and heteronormativity. Rose pink tentacles burst through the floors and walls, unabashedly disrupting architectonics, crystallising the air into seductive raw minerals. Smooth, shaped, totemic, metals and plastics form artifacts that expand the lexicology of the queer body and its often-troubled relationship with the world around it. Indoor grass is planted and left to indefinitely grow in any direction it pleases beyond physical and political boundaries. The gallery becomes a flicker of Fuchsian light, a garden before Eden, a taste of honey.

A Taste of Honey” is part of Make Visible: North Country, a chapter of the overarching Make Visible project developed by Shannon Novak. It aims to grow support for LGBTQI+ communities in the North Country region of New York State by making visible challenges and triumphs for these communities. This chapter manifests as work developed with local LGBTQI+ communities across multiple sites and is supported by the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery at St. Lawrence University. Hawkfish is human, non-human, cross-generational, and largely anonymous. The name of the art collective comes from the transgender “hawkfish” that is able to change sex back and forward, and therefore hard to trap/define re: human standards.