Friday, March 21, 2014

Rejection Letter From Lattitude 53 Gallery

Dear Gerry

Thank you for your submission to Latitude 53 Contemporary Visual Culture’s programming call. We were delighted to receive a large number of diverse submissions for our October deadline, and have been meeting to discuss them. On behalf of our selection committee, Board of Directors and our community, we really appreciate your consideration in responding.

All submissions have been reviewed thoroughly by a selected peer group and I regret to inform you that your specific submission was not selected for programming in our upcoming season.

The programming committee found the way that the images are framed within this proposal, and how the proposal is contextualized, to be exploitative, and disrespectful of the trans community.

Latitude 53 accepts submission proposals twice yearly and reviews these submissions on an ongoing basis. Our next deadline is 30 April 2014.

We really appreciate the time and effort you put into this application. Thanks again for submitting.

Sincerely,

......….

Update* I got a second rejection letter for the "Ladyboy Sex Worker" submission as well. The Latitude 53 jury (not sure who they are) hated that work, they felt it did not respect and exploited transgender people. I guess that is a matter of opinion, as other juries that showed (2 in the USA 1 in Canada) the work felt differently. I guess I need to strike Latitude 53 off future submission send outs  as we seem to disagree on issues of freedom of artistic expression-license, honesty in art and definitions of truthfulness. Sometimes as a artist and a art gallery you need to see the forest through the trees. I have limited funds for submissions so best to send work to medium range galleries that might apreciate and  accept the imagery. Still all comments both positive and negative are worth listening to and learning from, I appreciate the Latitude 53 folks thoughts.