Becoming Horse Girl movie series: Desert Hearts

5 - 5:15 PM Chazen Auditorium

My mother is a horse. An exhibition by Cat Birk artist Cat Birk will introduce Dessert Hearts and discuss the film's connection to their exhibtion.

5:15 - 7 PM Chazen Auditorium

Dessert Hearts film screening

Desert Hearts is a film that shows the propulsion of queer desire that pushes us to become something that we know ourselves to be. Seeing queer desire, Vivian, the protagonist, is empowered – albeit slowly and somewhat hesitantly – to experience it for herself. The film captures the sapphic, denim-clad, rancher chic aesthetic that is a part of the horse girl DNA.

Tickets to attend this film screening are free, but donations to OutReach LGBTQ+ Community Center​ are encouraged! They are committed to equity and quality of life for all LGBTQ+ people through community building, health and human services, and economic, social, and racial justice advocacy. Donate here!

DESERT HEARTS

1985 | Drama | 91 min

Donna Deitch’s swooning and sensual first film, Desert Hearts, was groundbreaking upon its 1986 release: a love story about two women, produced and directed by a woman. In the 1959-set film, an adaptation of a beloved novel by Jane Rule, straitlaced East Coast professor Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver) arrives in Reno to file for divorce, but winds up catching the eye of someone new, the younger free spirit Cay (Patricia Charbonneau), touching off a slow seduction that unfolds against the breathtaking desert landscape. With smoldering chemistry between its two leads, an evocative jukebox soundtrack, and vivid cinematography by Robert Elswit, Desert Hearts beautifully exudes a sense of tender yearning and emotional candor.

Artist statement on My mother is a horse. An exhibition by Cat Birk

I find relatable images in many places: trans literature, romantic encounters, and horse girl memes. Seeing myself in these images changes how I understand my embodiment and expands the web of relationships that forms my identity. These relationships are a source of strength and comfort. I coat the surface of my body with these images like a protective membrane: they become my emotional support images.

I am interested in how encounters with images and objects serve as conduits for processes of identity formation and the creation of trans4trans (t4t) networks. Locating, identifying with, and transforming these images has played an important part in forming my own transgender identity and finding my own (horse) girlhood. In these encounters, I expand my sense of self by identifying with something outside myself, reshaping the images themselves. Horses become fugitive signifiers of desire, support, and the (bio)genesis of a blossoming transfemininity. Entangling selfand other in this way emphasizes the highly mediated nature of embodiment and the co-constitutive relationship between individual and collective identities. This exhibition weaves paintings, silicone surfaces, prints, and sculptural objects into a t4t grid installation. Through casting and the repetition of the grid, I create relationships between multiples. My experimental approach to the process and materiality of casting focuses on its intimacy and reciprocity, recontextualizing the fraught, hierarchical relationship between copy and original. Understanding casting as mutable and imperfect, my objects become materializations of transness and allegories for t4t praxis. t4t describes desire and attraction, but also trans practices of mutual aid, care, and solidarity.

This installation uses the grid, the multiple, and the horse to signify trans embodiments and t4t methodologies that build trans community through mutual identification with images. Understanding the affective relationships between image (other) and identity (self), I recast the individual process of identity formation as a collective act of becoming that supports trans flourishing. Weaving webs between image, self, and community, I want this exhibition totransform my images into an emotional support t4t network.