ARCHIVE AS WEAPON: OUTLAW MEMORY, GAY HISTORIES, AND THE REFUSAL OF ASSIMILATION. ARTIST TALK WITH LOS ANGELES-based artist mark verabioff

claremont graduate university, oct 30, 12noon-1pm, board of trustees room, 150 east 10th street, claremont, 91711. open to the public

For over four decades, Los Angeles–based artist Mark Verabioff has waged a cultural insurgency through text, image, video, and appropriation. His practice weaponizes repetition, sabotage, and counter-archival strategies to resist the erasure and assimilation of outlaw gay histories. From the disposable cameras of the 1980s and 1990s that captured tricks, comrades and combatants, and subcultural desire, to his hijacking of propaganda, branding, and conspiracy slogans, Verabioff destabilizes the visual and linguistic codes that dominant culture uses to enforce order and erase difference.

In this artist talk, Verabioff will put his own practice into the conversation, tracing a trajectory from his early videotapes of the 1980s—works censored and contested during the AIDS crisis—to the raw counter-archive of disposable camera photographs that fed into his photo-text project FU<KBOOK. His immersive Speaker Boot performances, in which the artist transformed his own body into an absurdist sound system, reimagined typography and text as weapons of insurgency. More recently, Verabioff’s video works and installations extend this antagonism into the present, confronting what he calls the “digital pestilence” and the collapse of criticality into the “new bore” of assimilationist culture.

Verabioff situates these works within a lineage of punk antagonism, homocore radicalism, and post-conceptual art strategies that refuse respectability. His practice insists that art must remain volatile, memory must remain raw, and representation must resist capture.