COMMUNAL NOSTALGIA / a compendium of pansies

an MFA exhibition by a. r. havel

What began as an investigation of resurgent queer cruising cultures (theorized via an analysis of contemporary art as a responses to public sex cultures), expanded into curiosities of reflexive nostalgia and identity formation. The multimedia works I have created throughout the last 4 years encompass a wide breadth of historical (re)interpretations by way of allusion, repetition, cultural analysis and mirroring. As I have always played with artistic quotation—referencing images and narratives (often verbatim)—I have constructed queer lineages and alternative timelines that fold back on themselves; Elizabeth Freeman, José Esteban Muñoz, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht have been my guides in these historical hauntings and time-bendings. It is sprawling, it is “too much,” and it is disorienting; but if you wade through the density, you will find the through-line.

Isn’t that the joy of the archive? —To get deliriously lost and then found in some fleeting epiphany?

de pasie from Lyrical Nitrate film (1918)

and “re-staging Lyrical Nitrate” (2023)

“Queers in the Bramble” (2023) and

“The Bramble” (1983) by painter Patrick Angus

Hi8 archive inspired by Paper Tiger TV:

  1. “Lipstick and Attitude” (2023)

  2. “Lip-syncing Dean Johnson and the Weenies” (2023)

  3. “The Time is Now!” (2023)

“Two of Hearts” (2025) music video for Sabine McCalla / Douglas Bourgeois’ “Irma Thomas” (1997)

inspired by Roberto Bolaño’s “The Savage Detectives,” this three-part novel bridges all the referenced works into a diary-entry narrative spanning Mexico City, San Antonio, and New Orleans.

read most up-to-date version here.

I returned to performance art and dance in the Fall of 2025 to produce “COMMUNAL NOSTALGIA.” the first part was devised in a dance residency and was an allusion to 1970s thinkers and feminist dance work called “1972: Berger, Brown, Rainer.” I used John Berger’s ideas as a theoretical framework, and Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer’s choreographic strategies for movement.

this was re-imagined as a larger 1-hour piece called “COMMUNAL NOSTALGIA” performed on my birthday, September 20, 2025. The work combines personal storytelling with national socio-political narratives.

“Ode to Querque” (2025)

and “Love Sonnets” by Thierry de Mey (1993)