NYAB Event - Pacifico Silano “Tear Sheets”

Pacifico Silano “Tear Sheets”

Baxter Street/ the Camera Club of NY

This event has ended.

BAXTER ST at CCNY presents a solo exhibition by artist and 2015 Workspace Resident Pacifico Silano. In Tear Sheets, Silano creates composite images that appropriate gay iconography from 1970s and 80s porn magazines such as Blueboy, Torso and Honcho in order to negotiate his own identity and formative experiences as impacted by the AIDS crisis. As an abyss of pornography has moved from under the mattress to the mobile phone screen, gay identity and its relationship to the circulation of images is often left unexamined. In response, Silano’s Tear Sheets explores the visual culture and iconography of his queer predecessors to reconcile the loss and longing that permeates those affected by the AIDS crisis.

The work comprising Tear Sheets was crafted by tearing and obscuring the source material - juxtaposing pornography, advertisements and images of gay icons. Taking formal and conceptual cues from The Pictures Generation - the fragility and easy manipulation of the physical material along with images starkly isolated by expanses of negative space - expresses the loss of history, family and community depicted in the images. Like any archive that comes to shape a history, Silano’s Tear Sheets grapples with his personal power and the external forces that determine what is worthy of remembering and what is destroyed.

Media

• Photography

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