Artworks

The gallery presents TT Takemoto’s After Bed (murmurs), a trilogy of films making its exhibition debut. Takemoto engages with found footage and archival materials through performance and labor-intensive processes of painting, lifting, and manipulating 16mm and 35mm film emulsion. By interacting with tactile and sensory dimensions of queer histories, Takemoto conjures immersive fantasies involving butch surgeons and homoerotic breadmaking. Their films honor queer Asian Americans who lived, loved, and labored together during the prewar era and beyond.

Takemoto writes of After Bed (murmurs), “This film was made using 16mm color test footage from James Broughton’s erotic 1968 film The Bed that was generously passed along to me by Craig Baldwin from his Other Cinema archive. I became obsessed with the imagery showing lesbians, a bareback rider, and an Asian American woman eating and smoking a joint in bed. During my residency at Montalvo Arts Center, I worked on a DIY outdoor film bench, where I spent hundreds of hours lifting bits of emulsion and placing them onto 16mm leader with clear tape and nail polish.” The sound design by Kadet Kuhne pulses with irregular heartbeats and butterfly wings. The first film in the After Bed trilogy received the Grand Jury Award for Best Experimental Film at the QueerCine International Film Festival in Ghent, Belgium, in 2024.
After Bed (murmurs) marks Takemoto’s second presentation at Catharine Clark Gallery. In conjunction with Takemoto’s Media Room presentation, the gallery also announces the extension of TT Takemoto: Remembering in the Absence of Memory, on view at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University through April 6, 2025.