Photo Realness: The Queer Aesthetics of Photography

Schlomer Haus Gallery presents “Photo Realness: The Queer Aesthetics of Photography,” a group show curated by Christopher Tradowsky featuring Zackary Drucker, Clifford Prince King, Matt Lipps, Alec Marchant, Joe Sinness and Suzanne Wright. 

The six artists in “Photo Realness” are not all, or not strictly, photographers. Yet each artist exploits the dynamism of the photographic medium to slightly different ends, through candid and formal portraiture, intimate reportage, faux-fashion tableaux, appropriated imagery, archiving and collage, and photorealist drawing. 

With an emphasis on portraiture, “Photo Realness” explores the playfulness of photography and the ease with which, in the 21st century, this ubiquitous medium allows for the public projection of a private self. “Photo Realness” celebrates the ways photography helps queers do what queers do best: playing with the boundaries of gender and sexuality, testing and expanding them beyond norms and expectations, discovering new ways to live more openly, more expansively, more queerly. 

ARTISTS:

ZACHARY DRUCKER

Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, cultural producer, and trans woman who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality, and seeing. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, MCA San Diego, and SF MoMA, among others. Drucker is an Emmy-nominated Producer for the docu-series This Is Me, as well as a Producer on Golden Globe and Emmy-winning Transparent.

CLIFFORD PRINCE KING

Clifford Prince King is an artist living and working in New York and Los Angeles.  King documents his intimate relationships in traditional, everyday settings that speak on his experiences as a queer black man. In these instances, communion begins to morph into an offering of memory; it is how he honors and celebrates the reality of layered personhood. Within King's images are nods to the beyond. Shared offerings to the past manifest in codes hidden in plain sight, known only to those who sit within a shared place of knowledge. Public collections holding his work include the Hammer Museum, Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Arts, ICA Miami, Minneapolis Institute of Art and Studio Museum in Harlem.  Publications carrying King’s images as commissioned work and features include Apartamento, Aperture, BUTT, Cultured, The CUT, Dazed, Fantastic Man, i-D, Interview, T Magazine, The New York Times, Vice, Vogue and The Wall Street Journal.

MATT LIPPS
Matt Lipps refers to his practice as being "in, with, and alongside photography," to call attention to the profound ways in which we relate to notions of ‘the photographic’ as a shared historical artifact, a means of social engagement, and a material object. Employing collage strategies, sculptural tropes, and theater staging, he constructs three-dimensional compositions of appropriated images from high and low culture made into autonomous paper-dolls to be re-photographed. The newly-positioned constellation of images invites dialog about how photographs reflect and shape our ideas of self and other, the worlds we inhabit, and how we move through them. Matt Lipps (b. 1975) has a BFA in Photography from California State University, Long Beach and an MFA from University of California, Irvine. His work is in the permanent collections of The Getty, LACMA, SFMOMA, MOCA Los Angeles, the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), the Saatchi Gallery and the Pilara Foundation/Pier 24 (San Francisco). He has also participated in exhibitions at MCA Chicago, J. Paul Getty Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, SFMOMA, Klemm’s (Berlin), and Art In General (New York). Lipps is represented by Marc Selwyn Fine Art (Los Angeles), Jessica Silverman Gallery (San Francisco), Yancey Richardson Gallery (New York), and Josh Lilley Gallery (London).

ALEC MARCHANT

“Ambiguity is the driving force behind my still and moving photographic work. Artists are expected to have answers to questions that the general population does not have cerebral access to. Because being an artist is a rebellious act in and of itself: rebellion against mainstream opinions regarding culture, society and the world around us, it is more fitting and more authentic to rebel against the notion that artists provide their work to the public in order to invite answers, or generate discourse around topics unfamiliar. I purposefully neglect to provide clarity in the face of ambiguity. Rather, I create the ambiguity by actively maintaining an extremely personal narrative throughout my work.” - Alec Marchant

JOE SINNESS

Joe Sinness, whose primary medium is colored pencil, creates photo-realistic drawings so exacting they are easily mistaken for photographs—but only in reproduction. Viewed in person, the photographic sources are imbued with the artist’s exquisite handiwork, attesting to the months and even years invested in drawing a single image. Most of Sinness’s portraits are tailored to the sitter, who provides crucial input in how they are portrayed. At the same time, in his portraiture and other works, Sinness employs an aesthetic of collaged imagery—both original and appropriated—to visually narrate a history of queerness that is both shared and deeply personal, combining mainstream pop culture and a profound, often cryptic, love of camp. 

SUZANNE WRIGHT

“My work has always contained the residue of my time with Act Up. During the 80s in New York our collective believed in the power of art to change peoples minds and politics. As part of this group I believed that shock, controversy, and the extreme was the way to challenge views open possibilities. I have always been captivated by the giant structures of power. Their immensity, complexity and beauty at odds somehow with their overwhelming presence. They have transformed in my work from representing symbols of male power in opposition to the female body to being the metaphor of the body itself. Now transforming the architecture into a technological vehicle capable of carrying a spectrum of readings.” - Suzanne Wright