THIRD STREET GALLERY ARCHIVE: 2017 EXHIBITIONS: Just Kids: Tender Forever Video, Photographs and Installation by Megan May and Marval A Rex

Humboldt State University Third Street Gallery presents, Just Kids: Tender Forever, an exhibition of photography, mixed media and video installations by the artist couple Megan May and Marval A Rex, running January 31 through March 5.

Megan May and Marval A Rex, recent alumni of Humboldt State University, created Just Kids: Tender Forever, which portrays the nuanced nature of their relationship within the journey of Rex’s recent gender transition. The exhibit highlights their vulnerability, love, and evolution as a couple, offering an intimate insight of their life together.  
 
Just Kids addresses issues such as the intersectionality imposed within relationships, transness, the condition of being transgender, and further addresses the oppression, which the dominant culture  (often unwittingly) levies against the queer community.  May and Rex present an unconditional love thriving in the face of adversity.     

Considering themselves predestined for one another, May and Rex invite the audience to an inside look of their personal life. One piece, Altar Throughout celebrates their psycho-spiritual trajectory while photographs and video performances project both the realities and subjective understanding  of their shared  experience. May and Rex claim within Just Kids to be “self absorbed and unapologetic,” stating, “the work is about us, our connection, its divinity, and how it navigates a corporeal, normalized reality.”

This exhibit seeks to captivate all audiences, while providing critical exposure and support to the genderqueer and transgender community.

Megan May and Marval A Rex’s Just Kids: Tender Forever is produced by Humboldt State students. Students enrolled in the Art Museum and Gallery Practices Program who participate in the daily management and planning of shows at the gallery.  The gallery provides real-life opportunities for the students to develop their gallery and museum skills, which in turn provides them with experience that will help them to enter the job market. Many students who have participated in the program have gone on to careers in museums and galleries throughout the nation.

Artists’ Screening, Talk and Reception
Megan May and Marval A Rex will present a film screening and artists’ talk about their work at Humboldt State University on Friday, February 3 starting at 3 p.m. The presentation will be held in Room 218 in Ghist Hall on the Humboldt State University campus.  This event is free to the public and the campus community.

A reception for the artists will be held at HSU Third Street Gallery on Saturday, February 4 from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive program.  The exhibition will run from January 31 through March 5. The gallery is open Tuesdays through Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. and is closed on Mondays. Humboldt State University Third Street Gallery is located at 416 Third Street Eureka, California. The gallery was recently relocated and renamed after 19 years in its former location on First Street in Eureka. For more information, call (707) 443-6363

“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.” 
-Rainer Maria Rilke

My love for you has been the cauldron of your transformation. I cooked you inside me with all my eyes laid upon you, forgiving you every step of the way. I took your soul into my body and said yes, I took your body into my arms and confirmed your liquid desire to be free. I said, somehow amidst grief and fear, “Come out & be free of your prison. Come to the surface and see that you are Real.” This making of self we undertake that we might live and breath, this constant coming out in a world that feels like it cannot hold us, is our art. 
I fight against you, you fight against yourself, and still we desire to be free and to have love. Our self-aggrandizing nature is here, in this room. These fragments and compilations of our importance in this world is strength pulled to the surface by facing one another. By loving one another. We drudge through the murk of our mind, heart and soul for pearls of truth to bring to the surface and wear around our necks with grace and courage. Our effort is for recognition: See me, I am important, my body, is important, my desire, my sexuality, my power are important. You are important. 

In this room strung with our pearls, we have invited some part of the world to witness us in our sexuality, desire and power. We have tempered this holy trinity with love and mutual positive regard. We give form to the magic, the alchemy of Lovers.

Megan May
Winter 2017

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you like a mountain stream 
full of rushing enthusiasm 
the exuberance of young life 
a fool on the brink

4th hexagram of the I Ching, Youthful Folly

Love is like an ocean floor 
A clear solitude shared by two pairs 
of focused, lighted, eyes 
Beings sunk with feeling, 
blissful while drowning.

- Maria Angela Rechsteiner

I face myself, through You. I am a prince, resigned to this world. Our art, my art, all art, keeps me buoyant in the unseen magic. I feel larger than my body, larger than the mutant I am. And yet, with you, I have felt perhaps the most terrifying truth….that I am, we are, just kids.

We marry the paradoxes of the mundane and mystical. I hold naive pride over my mutation, and you pull me down into my humanness. I hide in isolation, and you expose each day in its majesty.

The greatest challenge has not been needles and testosterone, my name, my death within a life.

The greatest challenge, and what the work in Just Kids honors, is how I have begun to strip myself bare for You. I have broken myself down and you arose as the divine gift you are, to hold together jagged pieces of me as they heal. This work, as it catalogues me, you, and us, is for You. This work is to honor our love and our growth.   

The work in Just Kids: Tender Forever simultaneously exposes and obscures the inner lives of myself and Megan May/Dolphine Ryder. Megan/Dolphine and I have put ourselves up for display as many artists have done before. It seems we both share a taste for the martyrs of the art world— those who use their fragile corporeal forms as fodder for any and all to deconstruct. We love and admire the unfettered tenacity of Marina Abramovic, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Pipilloti Rist. We see their confessional vulnerability, we see it as our own. There is miracle within the martyr. Us two, we are modern day millennial martyrs. We are self absorbed and unapologetic. The work is about us, our connection, its divinity, and how it navigates a corporeal, normalized reality. So often we dream ourselves as divine beings to then struggle amidst the weight of the external world, with its expectations: its dirt and blood, its money and its time. And yet we honor the mundane, as we honor the mystical. We have our totems and we have our needles and pads. We have our ecstatic dance and we have our sex. We muddy the lines of the body and the spirit. Our work grounds us in both.

This work began as a dialectic of my transness and how love transforms through transition. Now, as the work begins to manifest as object and light, the true meaning bursts through the clouds and is rolled to shore by persistent waves. Just Kids: Tender Forever is a space that holds our two frail and ever-powerful bodies, and captures our fears and our joy. It is a space that carries with it the future reflections of many more collaborations to come. It is a space for our love, as it is a space for our desire to share our love with you.   

Inspiration for the work:

NYC (the whitney) 
Pippilotti Rist 
Glitchart 
Catholicism 
Patti and Rob 
Esotericism 
Feminism 
Spiritualism 
Love of the Body 
Ritual 
HSP 
Our Relationship

Marval A Rex
February 2017