Jamie Currie
Jamie Currie
Jamie Currie is a multiarts practitioner and writer whose eclectic, and studiedly anti-disciplinary practice promotes the queer life values of a radical amateurism. In an age that relentlessly instrumentalizes our activities into preordained categories of relevance, his art and research deals with how to inhabit mental illness and distress, and how things that are useless, broken, worn out, and discarded can help us to do so. He has worked with poetry, performance art, and installation art; collaborated as a librettist with composers, nationally and internationally; written public-facing memoir-driven non-fiction as well as intellectual work taking place at the intersections between art, politics, philosophy, and theory. And his work has appeared, amongst others, at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center (Buffalo, NY), Roulette (Brooklyn, NY), IRCAM at the Pompidou Center in Paris (France), and at the Aix-en-Provence Festival (France). Author recently of Doing Nothing (Duke University Press, 2026), he is presently an Associate Professor in the Department of Music at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), having also taught at NYU, Loyola University (New Orleans), and Columbia University in New York.
talk :The Queer Art of Habitation
As artists, we are frequently asked what our art is about. The assumption being that the primary function of art is to be about things; that this is the norm. But since I am a queer artist, and since being queer necessitates resisting norms, I question this. Although my art might ultimately be about something—and therefore part of an act of communication with an audience—it is first and foremost something for myself.
I will use examples from my own practice to talk about how my art functions as a form of habitation. In my recent book, Doing Nothing (2026), the act of writing was a means of me dwelling within the legacies of mental illness that I have inherited, rather than trying to cure myself of them. In my 2021 installation, Just Here, the use of abject materials and the studio space created a protective enclosure within the time of the COVID 19 pandemic. Both were means of inhabiting conditions that were ultimately non-negotiable. Where I was confronted by the limits of my agency. And I argue that this function of art is especially important in the radically unstable predicaments of our contemporary world.
Additional support by:
Critical Media Practices
Stadium 255 (Gate 7)
2085 Colorado Avenue
University of Colorado Boulder, UCB 477
Boulder, CO 80309-315
303-735-6382
Stadium 255 (Gate 7)
2085 Colorado Avenue
University of Colorado Boulder, UCB 477
Boulder, CO 80309-315
303-735-6382
