POSTPONED: Reception & Artist's Talk: "there are gardens at the margins"

"there are gardens at the margins" is a series of monumental portraits of queer Muslims living in the American South by Saba Taj, a visual artist based in Durham. In the resulting portraits, subjects emerge from surrealist dreamscapes cloaked with color and glitter, partial concealments that serve to maintain, rather than rectify, the implacability of these figures in mainstream American discourse. Taj renders subjects and their environments lavishly; they shimmer with glitter, rhinestones, appliqués, and beads, objects, and imagery that are drawn from our queer and diasporic heritages. The glittering artworks celebrate the abundance of subjects who embody liminality and the impossible.