Blackness, Queerness, and Techno. Representing Black Queer Techno counterculture, photographer Will Toney highlights the erasure of the Black roots of techno and its reclaimed history by Black Queer spaces. Toney’s installation is a sensorial guide that allows the onlooker to step into the anonymous silhouetted figures in raving light and experience Black ideas of how sound, light, and space mute or disrupt the mental or physical violence toward the Black Queer community.
William Toney Written by Rachael Reynolds
The materials with which Toney thoughtfully constructs his images provide immersive haptics to the installation. Using projected media, audio, tiled composite photographs, and constructed speaker panels with sound materials, Toney stations his images as a looking glass through which a club environment can be imagined. Toney joins a long history of Black use of silhouette by only offering depictions of figures devoid of personal identity. By removing individual specificity, the figure represents the Black experience rather than personal subjectivity. Particularly for a Black Queer viewer, Toney visually invites the audience to immerse themselves within the atmosphere he creates and the haven it provides. Techno culture is a mechanism of expression that protects the anonymity, agency, and safety of community. Like house music, ballroom, and disco before it, the development of EDM and Techno provided spaces for the Black and Queer communities to flourish without resistance. Toney’s work rejects the commodification of Black culture by reclaiming these histories and suggesting Queer as oppositional to the norm and synonymous with authentic progress. Queer rave spaces provide a cathartic and disembodied site for experimentation and anonymity among the crowd on a fog-filled dance floor. It allows the rave-goer to blend into the environment and community, creating a sense of belonging that disappears outside the rave doors.
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Speaker felt, glass, steel, and inkjet print mounted on a light box. Photo Credit: Neighboring States
Installation view. Speaker felt, glass, steel, laser print, inkjet print, speakers, light. Dimensions variable. Photo credit: Neighboring States
Installation view. Speaker felt, glass, steel, inkjet print, laser print, light, video (00:17). Dimensions variable. Photo credit: Neighboring States
Installation view. Speaker felt, glass, steel, inkjet print, laser print, light, video (00:17). Dimensions variable.
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TYLER SCHOOL OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE MASTER OF FINE ARTS CATALOG 2024