Anne Buckwalter is cleaning out the closet, so to speak, unmasking and normalizing hidden queer desire. A blood spot on a mattress, a horse-tail butt plug on the floor next to an open suitcase, fragments of nude bodies caught mid-intercourse outside windows and behind doors. Buckwalter's world is flattened and exposed, dollhouse-like and brimming with hidden clues as to its inhabitants' daily lives behind closed doors. Today, Buckwalter unveils a new series of gouache-on-panel paintings (her largest scale yet) and works on paper for her solo exhibition "I Will Clean the Closet, I Will Climb the Stairs" at Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco. On view through November 2, the exhibition marks the Maine-based artist's first collection of poems, Laundry Room, 2024, from which a portion of the proceeds will go to San Francisco's GLBT Historical Society. It also inaugurates the gallery's new space. The opening and book launch includes a reading and conversation between Buckwalter and the San Francisco-based writer Dodie Bellamy.
Known for her deliciously subversive renderings of Pennsylvania Dutch folk art, where carnal acts and intimate ephemera find their way into folksy, domestic spaces, Buckwalter's poems follow suit. Yet while her paintings are a house's worth of patterns and objects-the more kinky, hidden à la I Spy-her writing zooms in on specifics. The limited edition book's 30 poems are framed around personal items: running shoes, T-shirts of exes, getting dressed before the pride parade. Clothes to be worn during weddings and funerals, undergarments, and memories tethered to time and place. From here, Buckwalter delves into the ways in which sexual identity is expressed or concealed. Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and based in rural Maine, the 37-year-old artist's voyeuristic multi-room scenes are sourced from personal memories and imagery from books that span interior design, Pennsylvania Dutch culture, sex, art, and anatomy. Her recent solo exhibitions include Rebecca Camacho and Micki Meng in San Francisco, Massimo De Carlo in Paris, and Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York, and her soon-to-be-announced debut museum solo show opens next year. Below is an excerpt from Buckwalter's forthcoming poetry book...
Meka Boyle
