Love, Shame, Trash & Beauty: Forms of Contemporary Queerness
Curated by Dio Sumagaysay
On view now
Brassworks Gallery, Portland, OR

Brassworks Gallery is proud to present Love, Shame, Trash & Beauty, a group exhibition curated in celebration of Portland Pride Month. Featuring works by LGBTQ+ artists, the show explores the layered, contradictory, and ever‑evolving dimensions of queer identity in contemporary society.

The exhibition is organized around four emotional and aesthetic forces that shape queer experience:

* Love — honoring its many forms, its resilience, and its capacity to transform and sustain queer lives.
* Shame — confronting the internal and external pressures that produce feelings of rejection, concealment, or self‑doubt.
* Trash — reclaiming what society deems lowbrow, excessive, or disposable, and elevating it through humor, defiance, and play.
* Beauty — celebrating the aesthetic, emotional, and conceptual richness that emerges from queer ways of seeing and being.

Together, these works reveal queerness not as a single narrative but as a constellation of tensions—tender, messy, defiant, and luminous.