Plug In Institute for Contemporary Art would like to congratulate AA Bronson for receiving the 2014 AICA Award for his exhibition “The Temptation.”  We are pleased to have played a role in the production of “We Are Revolution” a series of diamond dust serigraph prints, which relate to his award winning solo exhibition at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam.  Plug In has a limited edition of these serigraph prints in an edition of fifteen in three colour variations (silver, green and red).

Between 2006 and 2009, AA Bronson collaborated with artist and academic Peter Hobbs on the project Invocation of the Queer Spirits, a series of five “performances” in five cities, in which a group of gay men gathered in a secret location at an unannounced time without documentation or an audience. The rituals that resulted are evoked, and invoked, in these prints entitled We are the revolution.

Together Bronson and his collaborators explored the various social forms of group therapy, ceremonial magic, the sweat lodge, witch’s covens, gay heart circles, and 19^th century spiritualist séances to create the queer hybrid they entitled Invocation of the Queer Spirits. The fourth of these was commissioned by Plug In ICA, and was held in Winnipeg’s abandoned United Army Surplus store in its last days, before it was torn down to construct Plug In’s new home, a state-of-the-art art and education facility that is co-owned by Plug In ICA and the University of Winnipeg.

We are the revolution presents an image of Bronson photographed by Winnipeg film-maker and Plug In President Noam Gonick moments before the invocation began. The prints are created with three hits of ink and a final application of titanium-coated or industrial diamonds on Saunders Waterford paper.

The portraits were originally presented as one of the opening exhibitions in Plug In ICA’s new galleries, so that the works were in fact standing in almost the exact location where the photograph was originally taken.

These prints refer to the Joseph Beuys self-portrait of 1972, La rivoluzione siamo Noi. Like Beuys, Bronson inhabits the multiple personaes of artist, educator, activist, and shaman to challenge the dominance of the marketplace in a consumerist society. Influenced in the late 60s by Beuys’ prodigious output of low-cost multiples and his performative and often collaborative approach to making art, AA Bronson went on to found General Idea with his collaborators Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal in 1969. They worked and lived together for 25 years until his partners’ deaths in 1994. Bronson now lives in New York City, where he is the President of Printed Matter, Inc. and the Artistic Director of the Institute for Art, Religion and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary.

These limited edition prints are available for sale through Plug In ICA / Plug In Editions as a fundraising benefit for Plug In’s ongoing program costs, and as such were generously donated to Plug In ICA by the artist. For more information or to purchase a print, please contact Plug In ICA Artistic Director Jenifer Papararo at info@plugin.org.