Towards is pleased to present Afters, an exhibition of new work by Jacob Todd Broussard.
The works in Afters stem from a chance discovery of a late forgotten family member after Broussard returned to his hometown of Lafayette, Louisiana. While researching the Mystic Krewe of Apollo de Lafayette – the longest running gay Carnivale organization in the state – Broussard came across images of a masked member. Upon further research, Broussard discovered that the masked individual was Gene Dominique, his mother’s cousin who had passed away two decades before, and unbeknownst to Broussard, was an original member of the The Mystic Krewe of Apollo de Lafayette. The Mystic Krewe of Apollo is an organization that was founded in New Orleans in 1969 to foster brotherhood, unity and equality within the gay community. Every year they stage an annual Bal Masque during the Mardi Gras season.
With Afters, Broussard explores ideas surrounding loss, memory, and invention. Using Gene as a starting point, Broussard hypothesizes on an invented archival memory–one made up of what ifs while simultaneously folding himself and his late second cousin into a biomythographic tall-tale. Afters examines a queer atemporal space encountered when locating oneself between things: between similarity and alterity, between the familial home and the disco, between the singular and the collective.
