JESSICA YATROFSKY, PHOTOGRAPHY, A HISTORY OF MASTURBATION
The video chronicles an androgynous and tattooed young man, the type of model that wouldn’t be out of place in conceptual style bibles like Re-edition or Man About Town, posing, while a narrator asks the viewer, “Is this Art?,” or, “if the New York Times said this was art, would it be art?…
D’ANGELO LOVELL WILLIAMS, CONTACT HIGH, 2022
Contact High offers an expansive engagement with the visualisation of desire and depiction of the Black body. Williams’s narrative images reflect the many forms in which Black queer people exist and have existed historically within each other’s lives, picturing them as sitters, lovers, caregivers, or shadows…
CATHERINE OPIE, DYKE DECK, 1995
Catherine Opie’s legendary 52-piece Dyke Deck of playing cards. Released in 1995, they feature highly stylised portraits of Opie’s queer community, many friends and others cast during an open call in San Francisco…
LOUISE BOURGEOIS, PEELS A TANGERINE
I was making a series for Channel 4 television called ‘The Truth About Art.’ The series included three films—one about God, another about animals and the third about sex. Louise, I calculated, had things to say about all of them. But mostly I was interested in sex…
MAXINE WALKER, SELECTED WORKS, 1985-1997
In her 1995 series, ‘Untitled’, British-Jamaican photographer Maxine Walker disrupts the idea of an approved womanhood through a photo booth style montage of self-portraits, presented as if taken within seconds of each other…
KATY GRANNAN, POUGHKEEPSIE JOURNAL
Katy Grannan relies on documentary photography as a point of reference in order to merge reality and fiction, while capturing the subtleties of her sitters’ psychologies…
CINDY SHERMAN, DOLL CLOTHES, 1975
Doll Clothes 1975 is a short black and white silent film by the American artist Cindy Sherman that combines live action with animated sequences. The film begins with a shot of the cover of a book (made by the artist) which is decorated with a flowery border and photographic cut-outs of women wearing old-fashioned hats and clothes…
TROY MONTES-MICHIE, SELECTED COLLAGES, 2013/2014
The themes I’m exploring are the intersections of race and gender and the exotification of the black male body. A lot of the more recent works I’ve been doing are images of black men from pornography that are cut up and collaged…
ANNIE SPRINKLE, POST PORN MODERNIST, 1993
Post Porn Modernist chronicles Annie Sprinkle's careers as a sex worker, pro-sex activist, and artist. Sprinkle begins with her transformation from Ellen Steinberg to Annie Sprinkle, an act that prompted her sexual revolution…
TRACEY EMIN, MY BED, 1998
First created in 1998, it was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1999 as one of the shortlisted works for the Turner Prize. It consisted of her bed with bedroom objects in a dishevelled state, and gained much media attention…
WHERE I’M FROM POEM
“Where I'm From” grew out of my response to a poem from Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet (Orchard Books, 1989; Theater Communications Group, 1991) by my friend, Tennessee writer Jo Carson. All of the People Pieces, as Jo calls them, are based on things folks actually said, and number 22 begins, “I want to know when you get to be from a place…
MIKE BOUCHET, UNTITLED VIDEO, 2011
It’s the first untitled work I’ve made. It’s composited from 10,000 porno videos that were downloaded off the Internet and 10,000 porno videos playing simultaneously in a big mosaic…
LORNA SIMPSON, SHE, 1992
Simpson focuses on challenging the construct of gender and questions society’s idea of femininity and how society thinks there is a direct link between codes of dress and femininity…
NONA FAUSTINE, WHITE SHOES, 2021
White Shoes is a collection of self-portraits taken in locations around New York that were central to the city’s once pivotal – and now largely obscured and unacknowledged – involvement in the slave trade…
WILLIAM E JONES, THE FALL OF COMMUNISM AS SEEN IN GAY PORNOGRAPHY, 1988
The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998) is an important video from a moment in Jones’s career when he was beginning to leave behind the world of independent documentary cinema for a more free-wheeling practice that existed – and continues to exist – at the margins between several disciplines…
DREAD SCOTT, WHAT IS THE PROPER WAY TO DISPLAY A US FLAG?,1988
In 1989, while on display at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, What is the Proper Way…? became the center of national controversy over its use of the American flag. President Bush Sr. declared What is the Proper Way…
CAROLEE SCHNEEMAN, INTERIOR SCROLL, 1975/77
The message I read for Interior Scroll is from the feminist texts in Kitch's Last Meal. The image occurred as a drawing; this image seemed to have to do with the power and possession of naming-the movement from interior thought to external signification, and the reference to an uncoiling serpent, to actual information (like ticker tape, rainbow, Torah in the Ark, chalice, choir loft, plumb line, bell tower, the umbilicus, and tongue)…
LEIGH LEDARE, PERSONAL COMMISSIONS, 2008
For the project Personal Commissions Ledare answered Women Seeking Men personal advertisements posted in various New York City newspapers. While primarily serving as a vehicle for seeking out companionship, these ads often referenced phrases such as “tribute”, which only thinly disguised the subjects’ participation within an underground economy of intimacy, sexual gratification and material validation…
GILLIAN WEARING, ALBUM, 2003
The mask occupies a central place in the videos and photographs of Gillian Wearing. Wearing has employed various kinds of masks—from literal disguises to voice dubbing—to conceal the physical identities of her subjects and allow them to reveal their innermost secrets…
HANK WILLIS THOMAS - UNBRANDED: REFLECTIONS IN BLACK BY CORPORATE AMERICA, 2005-2008
Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America explores fifty years of print advertising targeted towards African-Americans—from 1968, a year of heightened social and political protest that saw the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., until 2008, the year of the election of the first African American president…