Too Long; Didn’t Read!
Thursday, January 25, 2024 | 6:00 pm CT | Free | All ages | Register
Join us in the Social STUDIO with artist Sunny Leerasanthanah and artist-theorist and historian, Jill H. Casid. Leerasanthanah’s work is featured in the solo exhibition Sunny Leerasanthanah: Naturalization, on view at JMKAC through January 28, 2024.
Leerasanthanah and Casid will lead a conversation focused on the short story “The Bad Graft” by Karen Russell, published in the June 9 and 16, 2014, issues of The New Yorker and in Russell’s collection of short stories, titled Orange World. In the story, a Joshua tree takes root in a woman’s body after she is accidentally pricked. The themes in the story parallel those in Leerasanthanah’s exhibition regarding national park boundaries, interspecies relationships (or as described in the short story, an “erotic interspecies incursion”), possession of land and body, and descriptions that evoke alien invasion and body snatcher tropes. The conversation will be guided toward Leerasanthanah’s and Casid’s larger interests in queer ecologies and chimera.
If you do not have a subscription to The New Yorker, the website for the publication allows one free article per month for nonsubscribers. The short story is also published in the book Orange World, available through public libraries.
