Max Langhurst and Amos Mac “ID this”

Munch Gallery

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Munch Gallery presents the exhibition ‘ID this’, featuring Amos Mac’s photographic works and Max Langhurst’s installations. The exhibition explores the various levels and needs of identification. How do we identify ourselves within a group – both as an individual – and as a group member. When and how do we belong? Is ‘belonging’ essential for all forms of self-identification? Max Langhurst and Amos Mac question the many aspects of identification; audience and performer, sexuality and gender, race and culture, trust and fear, home and away.

Amos Mac Artist Statement:
In ‘ID this’, Amos Mac turns the camera on the trans male figure, concentrating on self-identification while creating visibility for an under-represented community of human beings. As a transsexual artist, Mac holds a strong commitment and responsibility to photograph other people of trans experience in a truthful, intimate way. By documenting transgender and transsexual people in their own spaces with an insider’s perspective, it counters traditional out-siders’ representations of trans people which tend toward the exotic, fetishistic, debased and false.

In 2008, Amos Mac began documenting trans men within the San Francisco community he lived in, pairing the photographs up with interviews of the models so that they had a platform to share their story. This project quickly led to his creation of Original Plumbing magazine, the highly celebrated quarterly print magazine showcasing the culture, art and lives of female-to-male trans people. Contrary to mainstream media’s representation of transsexuals, Mac documents his subjects by concentrating on their personal stories beyond “sex change” surgeries, hormone use or non-use. Mac’s photography proves that there is no right or wrong way to be a trans person, there is no “trans enough” or “trans too little,” only a wide spectrum that blurs the lines into self acceptance. Within ‘ID this’, Amos Mac’s work is a collaboration between two trans people, artist and subject, in which both parties are free to be vulnerable, and the resulting work is an intimate conversation between two othered outsiders.

Amos Mac lives in Brooklyn, NY. He has shown his work internationally, most recently at Leslie-Lohman Gallery in Manhattan.

[Image: Amos Mac “Ayden”]