Amassing a collection of Polaroids shot in nightclubs with her circle of creative collaborators between 1999 and 2004, Canadian artist Jordan King found a renewed interest in the format in 2020, upon inheriting some personal effects of the legendary 1970s–80s trans drag performer International Chrysis. Connected via the New York City apartment they each occupied, though three decades apart, King shot a series of Polaroid portraits in the space in collaboration with long-time friend Greg Manuel. The images pay homage to Chrysis and the legacy that she left behind after her untimely death in 1990. Revisiting the series for this outdoor installation and reflecting on it in the following text, King explores the queer histories inscribed within.

My untitled Polaroid series was shot Friday, March 13, 2020, in an apartment at Thompson and Houston Streets, in New York City. At that moment, the COVID-19 pandemic was still unfolding, yet I envisioned my life in the city carrying on. I felt a responsibility for the apartment on Thompson Street.

The space carried significant cultural weight within a small subset of downtown nightlife culture. It had been home to a host of performers, musicians, drag queens, and entertainers in the nearly forty years prior to the time I resided there, between 2017 and 2020. It had remained in the hands of one leaseholder for that duration, the performer and longtime New Yorker Clark Render, who had moved to the city in 1978. The apartment represented a direct link to a disappearing history that included East Village nightclubs such as The Pyramid, Club 57, Danceteria, the Mudd Club, and CBGB’s; annual events like The Wigstock Festival; and the weekly nightclub event Jackie 60, which took place throughout the 1990s. The apartment had never been updated—Clark resisted any intervention from the building’s owners. Entering it felt like stepping back in time. The four-room space had a quirky patina of age and character which was magical regardless of its deterioration. I connected deeply with the apartment’s history, and with Clark.

A key component of my bond with Clark was my knowledge of the area’s historical nightlife scene, which included an awareness of International Chrysis, a multi-talented entertainer who had passed away in 1990. Chrysis performed at uptown cabarets and downtown drag bars throughout the 1970s and ’80s, and, significantly, she too was a transgender woman. She represented a unique bridge between these various performance worlds, and although there are other examples of trans women active in drag entertainment, Chrysis was the first that I myself had identified, through research on an online forum called the Motherboards. Chrysis and I shared a great deal in common. I too discovered myself onstage through drag performance at the age of 18, and like Chrysis did at around the same age, quickly began my transition process. The process began for me in the year 2000, a time when navigating medical and bureaucratic systems was mostly underground. Further, there were few role models or media personalities to look to at that time who were speaking publicly about their transition processes. Chrysis represented an example of a trans person who had managed to forge a path and enjoy many career successes prior to her death at the age of 40. 

On my first visit to the apartment, I learned that Chrysis had resided there in the 1980s and been close with Clark. I later inherited a handful of significant items, including a copy of Chrysis’ performance resume and an 8×10-inch headshot, along with a small collection of Polaroids and other photographs. This direct queer lineage—handing down personal effects, but also sharing knowledge, survival skills, safe spaces, etc.—which at one time was an important facet of queer life in major cities, seems to occur less frequently now. The broader cultural awareness and acceptance of gender and sexual variance over the last twenty years—a key factor being access to information via the internet—has counterintuitively disrupted the critical tradition of direct knowledge transfer and history sharing among queer and trans communities. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, LGBTQI2S+ people gravitated to urban centers to discover community, and would learn from and be supported by those who had walked similar paths before them, in the way I did when I moved to New York in 2017.

My collaborator Greg Manuel and I spontaneously shot this series of Polaroids on Friday, March 13, 2020, during the last weekend I spent in the apartment before my return to Canada as a result of the pandemic. Greg and I have maintained a collaborative conversation through photographic images over many decades. We did not set out to recreate any single photograph of Chrysis when the images were taken, however, looking at them now I see Chrysis’ powerful influence. The series, including the image featured in the billboard installation, was shot in the room Chrysis had lived in. In that image, I am framed in profile, posed against a nondescript white wall, with adornments including a red ostrich’s feather and a mesh burlesque bra that I made. The period in which the photograph was taken is indiscernible, both the medium, with its iconic white border, and the content conjuring notions of the 1960s, the 1980s, and the present. Although a seemingly simple image, it follows a queer lineage, evocative of Warhol’s Polaroids of Candy Darling and other queer legends made at The Factory. The layers of queer-coded detail within it, particularly viewed at such a large scale, allude to and celebrate the connections between—and, critically, the continuity of—generations of queer and trans performers.

— Jordan King

Untitled Polaroid Series by Jordan King is on view until May 31.
Presented by CONTACT in partnership with Gallery 44.
Supported by PATTISON Outdoor Advertising.
Curated by Sameen Mahboubi.

Jordan King is a Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, curator and writer. Her practice is rooted in performance, archival research and intergenerational dialogue. She completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at OCAD University in 2024 with a focus on documentary film and multimedia documentation of underground queer performance.