Venus. © Lorenzo Triburgo and Sarah Van Dyck

After 10 years of taking testosterone, NYC-based artist Lorenzo Triburgo stopped cold for the duration of their residency and exhibition at Baxter Street Camera Club of NY.

During the process, Triburgo collaborated with partner Sarah Van Dyck to produce a series of glittered environmental performance-portraits that reference art history and contort the ever-complicated gaze. Van Dyck photographed Triburgo in the historically queer haven of Queens, New York City's The People's Beach at Jacob Riis Park, Triburgo's body grounded in a space they describe as “sanctuary and resistance.” Triburgo poses with equal nods to Michaelangelo’s David and Botticelli's Venus, confronting viewers’ potential blindspots to the gray areas of gender identity.

Titling the series Shimmer Shimmer, Triburgo and Van Dyck pace these portraits with photos of glitter representing constellations – a celestial breath of calm, hope, and magic. For Triburgo, this collaboration responds to reductive assumptions of queer and trans identity in popular culture, painting gender as something that is as fluid and enigmatic as the stars above.

Triburgo and I spoke to illuminate, clarify, and perhaps open the door to more questions.

PostedNovember 24, 2020

AuthorJon Feinstein

TagsLorenzo Triburgo, Sarah Van Dyck, Camera Club of New York, Baxter Street Camera Club of NY, queer identity and photography, performance art, photography and performance, the gaze, Riis Park Beach, queer resistance, the shimmer, shimmer shimmer

Since the early 2000’s, Adam Ekberg has been making photographic spectacles that play on, and sometimes poke fun at the trial and error of the scientific method. Engaging milk cartons, paper airplanes, beer bottles, and dominoes with mirrors, flashlights, prisms, and other science-fair ephemera, his photographs depict highly controlled, yet seemingly pointless experiments that make science and fantasy seem easy, approachable, and even humorous. Sometimes spending days at a time staging a single still life – for example, an image of milk spilling seamlessly from carton to carton – until he gets it right, Ekberg’s pictures, unaided by digital manipulation, recall childhood playfulness and present an optimistic view of the often overlooked. Unlike the heavy, cinematic tableaus of Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall, his lighthearted theatrics, though precise and intentioned, wears its self consciousness on his sleeves. I caught up with Adam after his recent solo exhibition at Seattle’s Platform Gallery, to learn more about his process and ideas, and his recent monograph The Life of Small Things.

PostedMay 19, 2016

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Portfolio

TagsAdam Ekberg, performance art, science fiction, science fair, staged photography, new photography, photography as performance

Coorain Devin, host of the new video art talk-show web-series, Coloring Coorain, is a renaissance-hatted conceptual artist, TV star and cultural wonder producer who uses campy humor to address complex themes ranging from feminism and queer identity, to poetry, vernacular photography, and even personal health issues. Their playful, and often heartwarming approach, which credits influences spanning Candy Darling, Oscar Wilde, Dave Eggers, and John Waters, help to make these issues more accessible to a range of audiences without dilution or sacrifice of content. Corain recently collaborated with 15 photographers to produce a calendar picturing the artist as a means to to explore some of these same issues "at a time when queerness is frequently appropriated, repackaged and deployed as entertainment." Coorain's work gives agency and visibility to them, and their influence on contemporary pop culture. We interviewed Coorain to learn more.

The Celestial Complexity of Queer Identity

Adam Ekberg: Interrupting the Elements

(You Should Know) Who the F is Coorain Devin?