San Francisco, June 3, 1998-- Queer Arts Resource, the premiere website for Gay and Lesbian visual artworks (www.queer-arts.org), continues its leadership role in helping to define and present queer art and culture on the Internet.

Net Selections '98, to be launched in September, is the first juried exhibition of its kind seeking to examine how queer artists are using the Internet as an artistic medium.

"The World Wide Web provides a unique format for artistic expression before an international audience," says QAR Director, Barry Harrison. "QAR is taking advantage of this new technology, both as a means of showing the work of queer artists, and a way of reinforcing the role and contribution of queer artists in society. It is part of QAR's mission to foster an emerging queer community via the Web. With this juried exhibition, we are creating a unique cultural event, accessible to all."

The caliber of the jurors is expected to draw submissions from artists around the world. The jurors include six leading figures in Queer or Internet theory, and their challenge is to select a limited number of outstanding pieces for exhibition on the QAR site. "Artists, designers, filmmakers and creators of multimedia are increasingly exploring the Web, not just as another channel to promote their work, but as a new and exciting medium that transforms how they work and what they produce," says Harrison.

The jurors for Net Selections '98 are: Aaron Betsky, Curator of Architecture and Design, SFMOMA, San Francisco; Shu Lea Cheang, Video artist and Cyber Homesteader, Amsterdam; Alex Galoway and Rachel Greene, Rhizome Communications, New York; Ed Gilbert, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; and Robert Atkins, author/critic, New York. [see juror bios below]

Entries for Net Selections '98 are being accepted through July 15th, 1998. Artists interested in submitting work for the email: curators@queer-arts.org for more information.

About Queer Arts Resource

With almost 200,000 hits each month, QAR has become the leading venue for queer artists to show and discuss their work. "Our visitors are eager for information and a greater understanding of the enormous contributions queer artists have made and continue to make," says QAR Director, Barry Harrison. "Their work has, for centuries, been censored and distorted. It is part of QAR's mission to serve as an authoritative resource for queer art. This series of siteworks forms a unique archive of visual and textual material that is available to millions of people on-line."

Founded in 1996, Queer Arts Resource is a not-for-profit educational forum for the display and discussion of queer content in the visual arts. Until the recent advent of Queer Studies, the History of Art has omitted most material of direct relevance to lesbians and gays. Much has been suppressed, much has been lost due to neglect or censorship, and a great deal has simply been overlooked. Through interpretive exhibitions and the promotion of scholarly research, QAR is reclaiming our community's cultural heritage. QAR is a project of the Tides Center of San Francisco.

Queer Arts Resource
http://www.queer-arts.org
160 Chattanooga St. San Francisco, CA 94114
email: pr@queer-arts.org
415.642.3624

Juror bios

Robert Atkins is a New York-based art historian and the founding editor of TalkBack! A Forum for Critical Discourse, the first American on-line journal about art and cyber-cultural issues (http://talkback.lehman.cuny.edu/tb).

A former columnist for The Village Voice, he has written for more than 100 publications throughout the world and received awards for art criticism from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and Manufacturers Hanover Bank. His most recent book is ArtSpoke: A Guide to Modern Ideas, Movements and Buzzwords 1848-1944, which is a companion to his best selling contemporary art guide, ArtSpeak, now available in 5 languages. He has also curated exhibitions at venues as far-flung as Tokyo's Sagacho Art Space and the Sao Paulo Bienal. In 1991, he co-curated From Media to Metaphor: Art About AIDS, the first major travelling group exhibition about AIDS. He is currently working on a book called The Gay and Lesbian Looker: How Queer Artists Revolutionized Art At the End of the 20th Century .

Shu Lea Cheang is an installation artist, filmmaker, and cyber homesteader.Her video installations, structured to activate cross-cultural collaboration, include Color Schemes (1990, Whitney Museum, New York), The Airwaves Project (1991, Capp Street Project, San Francisco), Those Fluttering Objects of Desire (1993, Whitney Museum Biennale Exhibition, New York). Her feature film Fresh Kill, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, New York State Council on The Arts, Channel Four, UK, ITVS, was premiered at Berlin International Film Festival (1994) and included in the Whitney Museum Biennale Exhibition (1995).

Over the past few years, she has done installations that traverse actual and virtual spaces: Bowling Alley (1995, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis), funded by AT&T New Art/New Vision, net-links a local bowling lane with the Walker Art Center's gallery space and www. Elephant Cage Butterfly Locker (1996, Atopic Site Exhibition, Tokyo, sponsored by Tokyo Government on Public Art), traces US radar detect in Okinawa. Buy One Get One (1997, awarded 2nd prize, NTT/ICC Biennale Exhibition, Tokyo; part of the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale special project), locates net-access in Africa and Asia with a bento digi-suitcase. http://www.ntticc.or.jp/HoME. Currently, Shu Lea is working at DeWaag, Society for Old and New Media Amsterdam Nieuwmarkt.

Aaron Betsky joined the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as Curator of Architecture and Design in February, 1995. In 1997, he mounted Icons: Magnets of Meaning, a large exhibition of mass produced objects. Mr. Betsky is also active as a writer on design and is a Contributing Editor of Architecture, Metropolitan Home, Blueprint and ID magazines. Mr. Betsky has published eight books on architecture and design, including Violated Perfection: Architecture and the Fragmentation of the Modern (1990), James Gamble Rogers and the Architecture of Pragmatism (1994), Building Sex: Men, Women, Architecture and the Construction of Sexuality, and Queer Space:The Spaces of Same Sex Desire (1997).

Rachel Greene is the Editor of RHIZOME, an online publication about new media art. She was a juror for the 1997 Casas Das Rosas Web Art Competition in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Curating experience includes My Favorite Web Sites are Art, for a national Canadian Art Festival, and an online show (title forthcoming) with Heath Bunting. She has spoken about new media art at institutions including Parsons, New York University, The Slade (UK), and The Royal College of Art (UK).

She studied English and Intellectual History at the University of Pennsylvania and received a BA with Honors, Cum Laude, in 1994. She received an MA in English from the University of Sussex in January 1996, where she studied Consumerism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Renaissance Literature, and wrote her dissertation on Narcissism.

Alexander R. Galloway is currently Associate Editor and Technical Director of RHIZOME, an online publication about new media art (http://rhizome.org). Mr. Galloway has a considerable expertise with computer languages including Perl, JavaScript, and HTML/Dynamic-HTML. He is also a Customer Service Technical Group (cs-tech) Member at AMAZON.COM (http://www.amazon.com).

His print and online publications include Fonts and Phrasing, Digital Delirium (New York: St. Martin's,1997), 2 Keywords For The Digital Text: Object And Protocol, ZKP4 (Ljubljana: Nettime, 1997), TEL QUEL and the French Avant-garde: 1960-1982 (Seattle: press media, 1996), What is Digital Studies? DIGITAL STUDIES (http://altx.com/ds,1997), translated into Spanish at Aleph (http://aleph-arts.org/ds), Fonts and Phrasing at CTHEORY (http://www.ctheory.com, 1996), Browser.Art at Intervisions (http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com, 1997), and numerous articles/interviews at RHIZOME (http://rhizome.org).

Mr. Galloway graduated magna cum laude, Brown University (1996). He has been awarded the Duke University Literature Program Funding Award (1997 to 2002), Susan Colver Rosenberger Prize (for senior thesis), Brown University (1996), and the Donald Nodein Fellowship for Foreign Travel, Brown University (1993)

Ed Gilbert, is the Director of Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, where he has assisted Paule and their artists for the last ten years. The gallery represents a broad spectrum of work, from paintings to sculpture and conceptual art including the estate of Jerome Caja, works by Nayland Blake and a number of other gay artists.

Ed Gilbert is active in the Bay Area arts community serving as President of the Board of Southern Exposure and, formerly, on the Arts Advisory Board of the Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens. He studied Art History at Sussex University in England and at the University of Paris I and IV.