Raggedy Stan’s Closet

I beg of you: enter my world. A space of perpetual contemplation. Welcome to Raggedy Stan’s Closet. As you enter, you may feel some dissonance. Do not fret! This is my interior world, not yours. Living as a nonbinary person, I have developed a relationship with my inner self that is barred from the outside. Raggedy Stan is my imaginary friend! They are fabricated from years of trauma onto my identity. Trauma of varying degrees—from bullying and harassment to internalized homophobia. Over the years I have fed into my apprehensions and made them larger than they are. Raggedy Stan’s Closet has been a safe place for me to be alone away from the horrors of the outside. A place to escape to when the world felt like too much to handle. This safe haven was a suitable outlet for a while until it became cumbersome. I have begun to feel the weight of the closet again as my apprehensions grow larger…

Nishan Ganimian, Raggedy Stan’s Closet, 2023, video, 5:43.

I have chosen to display these apprehensions, making commentary on the existence of the white gallery space in the process. In Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1986), Brian O'Doherty writes, “For many of us, the gallery space still gives off negative vibrations. When we wander in, esthetics are turned into a kind of social elitism—the gallery space is exclusive,” (O’Doherty 76). This exclusivity is parallel with the exclusivity that white cisgender heteronormativity provides to men who fit within that standard. I have displayed this through the use of found objects which I painted white to establish a relationship to the pedestal of the gallery space. These ‘pedestals’ are used to add context to each sculpture becoming part of the work itself. I have withheld access to the interior of these sculptures using padlocks to speak to the inaccessibility of queerness that our society withholds. The white walled gallery becomes an echo chamber for the standards that our society oppresses upon us. 

“Works of art are mounted, hung, scattered for study. Their ungrubby surfaces are untouched by time. This eternity gives the gallery a limbolike status: one has to have died already to be there,” (O’Doherty 15). Living as a queer nonbinary person I am in a state of limbo, as is the white gallery space. It is a place of contemplation which provides the spectator with an internalized monologue provided by the eye. The purpose of the white gallery space is to separate it from the outside world. However, as people actively living in this world, once we enter the gallery space and are confronted with works of art we cannot help but acknowledge the world that surrounds us. 

Nishan Ganimian

O'Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. San Francisco, CA: The Lapis Press, 1986.

Photos by Bailey Anderson