Pose

Pink craft paper, mylar, silkscreen, acrylic paint, light, and risographed poster. 2019.

Pose is centered on this idea of the posturing that occurs in advertising, focusing specifically on the presentation of the cisgender gay male body. The central focus was placed on a Calvin Klein Underwear advertisement in which a martial artist and model are caught in this simultaneous battle and/or dance in order to sell the underwear included. This confusion of embrace was the central element of the work, and I responded to it with this arrangement of mass culture and art world imagery that intermixed within this wall composition. These images ranged from a fragment of the Parthenon Frieze depicting a human and centaur stuck in this ‘embrace’ along with this late 19th Century Eadweard Muybridge photograph of two men frozen in the act of wrestling. The addition of the larger pink backdrop acted as this stage that the viewer would walk into and become part of the work, put in context with this silkscreened human torso and magnified bronze finger, expanding on the context of cisgender male physicality and sexuality within.