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

“Ode to Querque” (2025)

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

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)

video works

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

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.