Local Legend is a solo show by Bun Stout in the windows of Co-Prosperity until August 14th.

Opening Friday 7/15 at 8pm with a live runway show of the collection with the augments projected on a screen for group viewing, live music by FETTER, and livestreaming of the event via LumpenTV.

Bun Stout’s fashion collection Local Legend is an ode to a chosen family of twentysomething trans punks who found themselves shuffling back and forth between rural Indiana and Chicago for work and community. From race jackets to billboards to mothwings, the vivid regional specificity of these ethereal otherworldly outfits pays tribute to hard yet insistent days and nights of queer subsistence and creative DIY world-making. Each of the five wearables in the window, which will be featured in a one-night-only drag show, also features an augmented reality trigger that will activate an immersive digital poem by the artist. The assemblage of looks, imagery and poetry leaves behind a map that testifies to trans survival: “I kiss my last honeysuckle, and last wild onion / Dry year, corn so thin it makes a blue space / and I can see the way through.”

• Read the full text by Noa Michaela Fields here.

  To be a legend is to be an icon, larger than life. Relatedly, a legend is also a story that outgrows itself to mythical proportions. Being fabulous requires fabulation, self-mythologizing—as nightlife scholar madison moore observes, “fabulousnessness turns out to be very much about storytelling, a poetics of the self.” There is yet another meaning of legend: a key or visual aid for how to read a map.

  Queer geography is a story of reclaimed public spaces and private intimacies. For proof of this, look no further than the community generated digital project Queering the Map, a map full of pins and annotations all over the world with anonymous coming out and first kiss stories, sexual exploits, and other local legends. This mapping is crucial: queer-specific spaces in-person and online can be sacred congregational sites for us to find ourselves and each other. Even when they are ephemeral, queer spaces are portals to access intimacy and acceptance denied elsewhere in everyday life. We are here and we are not alone. Queer world-making is a crucial pathway for us to find one another and seek out other ways of living beyond heteronormativity.

  So let’s ride I-65 and get out of here. Why not talk back to the conservative billboards and short-circuit the message with a vengeance poem of our own? For one look, Stout appropriates the infamous “HELL IS REAL / JESUS IS REAL” billboard staked on Indiana farmland along the highway, one among many similar evangelical roadside signs throughout the country. The hell we’re put through. Recontextualized in bubble text on a black vinyl princess dress, the billboard’s proselytizing now animates a more radical scenario: the defiance of queer and trans existence, and not in need of redemption. You can almost hear an echo of Sylvia Rivera cackling, “Hell hath no fury like a drag queen scorned.” Save your own soul.

  Opulently adorned blue racing jackets comprise another ensemble for a drag duo. Derby and sports pageantry are inherently campy in their gendered hyperperformativity and nostalgia for americana. By mixing high femme and hard butch details like satin and camoflauge for an androgynous look, Stout bends the rules and blends the roles, mapping out other possibilites for genderqueer self-expression beyond a gender binary.

  A runway holds space for escape, for our imaginations to run ahead and summon another way of feeling. Surprise and astonishment are essential to its logic. The DJ (Fetter) and the models from Chicago’s queer nightlife circuit (Hedilio, Celeste, Gigi, Riley, and Jojo) were essential collaborators in bringing the pieces to life, supplying subversive charm and playful elegance as they embarked on curved lines of flight across the room, then settled into a pose—extending an embroidered purse, or exposing a floral patch on the back of a jacket before the designer’s iPad to trigger the augmented poem to appear.

  Stillness might be surprising in such an energetic and multisensory environment, but it made room to read more deeply into the looks and the poetry projected on its seams. Flashing on a projector across the room, Stout’s poem gives voice and context to the looks. Visions of angels on long car rides back and forth between day and night shifts that can’t be missed. Pre-dawn delivery shift. Fists of queen anne’s lace. GET OFF MY LAWN. We don’t need your permission to emerge as ourselves.

  The hybrid futureform of augment imagery and digital poem throughout the fashion collection is otherworldly. The shifting technology of mixed reality remixes the present to make space for a different time and place, an imaginary elsewhere blooming with potentiality. To “augment” is to improve, and the virtual elements, abound with fantastical landscapes of florals and reminisces of anarchic camaraderie, feed dreams of a better and safer world of care. This digital manifestation of queer world-making “cruises utopia,” opening us up to experience what José Muñoz insisted is “not yet here”: “Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.”

  Worldmaking is a collective enterprise, and it is important to credit the shared participation of all the cultural workers involved, from fashion designers to drag performers to friends who helped edit the text, by name and with payment. The integrity of this process and how it provides material support for trans and nonbinary artists from Chicago’s nightlife scene is integral to this exhibit’s ambitions. It is not enough to imagine another world; the practices of trans care we instantiate in the present—like mutual aid, gig-sharing, or emotional support—are how we lift each other up and rise together.

  - Noa Michaela Fields

The collection will be displayed in the windows of Co-Prosperity with QR codes for access to the augments until August 14th.

Following, the collection will move to Indiana University for exhibition in “Identity/Identify.”