Mustang

In an age of endless self-imaging, my wider photographic practice explores the expanded potentials for self-representation that emerge on the stage of the digital image.

Where the camera is conventionally claimed to possess a unique capacity for revealing something of a subject to its viewer, in my own practice, I instead perform acts of queer photographic dis/appearance.

My figure is buried beneath elaborate costumes that mutually entice yet resist the viewer’s examination while the image itself is polished and manicured, taking on an implausible synthetic glow that renders the image’s graphic, shallow, cartoonish.

This double bind of a figure both conspicuously produced for the lens while remaining nowhere to be seen — hiding in plain sight — reflects my interest in the potentials for queer representational in/visibility in which subjects pass before the camera un/seen.

The photographic works within the series Mustang — presented for the first time alongside both moving image and textile-based artworks — form part of an imaginary queer blockbuster. Cinematic stills in which a single faceless hero-cum-heartthrob shifts through a wardrobe of camp costumes and stages a series of cinematic clichés.

As a collection of images, the works are deliberately non-linear and devoid of a coherent through line. Mustang instead offers a cyclical and unruly queer narrative, freeze-frames of filmic tropes that can be reassembled in endless ways without ever offering a clear, cohesive or happy ending.

Gerwyn Davies

For information regarding acquisitions, please contact dean@michaelreid.com.au