The Dining Room © Guanyu Xu — *The Dining Room* © Guanyu Xu

Beijing-raised, Chicago-based Guanyu Xu’s latest series, Temporarily Censored Home processes the complexities of living and working as a queer artist across cultures of freedom and restriction.

A recent graduate of School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s MFA program, Guanyu Xu is free to pursue projects that examine his intersectional experience of race, sexuality, and citizenship when in the United States. In Beijing, however, where Xu grew up and where his parents presently live, revealing these significant personal details and their importance to his creative practice gets complicated. It invites unwanted attention from both family and a repressive political regime that prides itself on controlling the lives of its citizens.

In his latest series, Temporarily Censored Home, for which the artist was recently shortlisted for Aperture’s prestigious 2019 Portfolio Prize, Xu covertly creates installations in his parents Beijing home when they are unaware, and photographs them. Straddling a line between installation art, sculpture, and photographic document, he combines images from his childhood and adolescence with portraits of his present-day self and other gay men, forcing an otherwise censored space to recognize his humanity.

After a productive portfolio review at SPE National in March, we communicated about his latest work ad the experience and ideas driving it. He wrote at length about how desire is shaped, the tension of mounting and breaking down clandestine installations while his parents are out of the house, and the varied media and textual sources that influence his practice.

Roula Seikaly in conversation with Guanyu Xu.

PostedJune 20, 2019

AuthorRoula Seikaly

CategoriesArtists, Portfolio

TagsAperture 2019 Portfolio prize, Guanyu Xu, Roula Seikaly, photographer interviews, new photography, SAIC photography MFA, queer photography, photographic interventions

Self Portrait As My Mother As A Cheerleader, 2018 © Vaughan Larsen — *Self Portrait As My Mother As A Cheerleader, 2018* © Vaughan Larsen

Inserting himself into existing family photos, the artist questions and queers how we represent gender identity through the photo album.

Family photos are often our first experience of photography. The images collected in analog albums or on computers and phones capture everything from the momentous to the mundane. Usually organized according to time’s linear progression, these snaps offer proof of the beauty, awkwardness, and hard-fought grace that settles over us as we age.

Those same photos also reveal who or what is missing, if we look long enough.

Vaughan Larsen’s series Rites examines and destabilizes the gendered rituals that family photographs capture. In re-staging both important and trivial events, Larsen inserts himself - and countless others - into familial rituals and rites of passage that are too often off limits to queer-identifying people.

I met Larsen during a brief portfolio review at the SPE National conference in March. In advance of his exhibition, on view at New Orleans’ Myth Gallery through June 8, we spoke again about Rites, the role of humor and performance in the series, and the importance of representation and what viewers take for granted in vernacular photography.

Roula Seikaly in conversation with Vaughan Larsen

PostedJune 4, 2019

AuthorRoula Seikaly

TagsVaughan Larsen, Roula Seikaly, queer photography, Vernacular Photography, New photography, Family Photographs

I first encountered poet Philip Matthews and photographer David Johnson at Chicago's Filter Photo Festival in late 2018. Though our portfolio review was a brief 20 minutes, it was immediately clear that their collaborative effort Wig Heavier than a Boot was a fulsome, even revelatory experience. The project, which will debut as a book published by Kris Graves Projects in October 2019, reveals a rich creative relationship between Matthews, Johnson and Petal, a drag persona who acts as the artists’ muse and teacher.

In advance of their talk at SPE this coming Saturday March 9th, we spoke about the project's origin and evolution, the nature of collaboration, and matters of gender and representation in a photo- and art historical context.

Roula Seikaly in conversation with Philip Matthews and David Johnson

PostedMarch 4, 2019

AuthorRoula Seikaly

CategoriesPortfolio, Publications, Galleries, Artists, Photobooks

TagsWig Heavier Than A Boot, queer photography, Philip Matthews, David Johnson, Kris Graves Projects, photography and performance, Roula Seikaly, New Photography

Vision, 2018 © Rachel Stern — *Vision, 2018* © Rachel Stern

Rachel Stern's latest photographic series, More Weight uses Arthur Miller's classic play as a metaphor for the chaos of present-day media, culture, and politics.

"More weight," Giles Corey's famous last words spoken while stones were being piled upon him at the end of Arthur Miller's The Crucible is a historical symbol of resistance to the tyranny of the Salem witch trials. Philadelphia-based photographer Rachel Stern uses these words as the title for her latest exhibition – on view at Brandeis University through October 26th – a metaphor for our current uncertain, often logic-free times. Her photographs are unapologetically staged and intentionally contrived, casting our current political and cultural climate as a theater of the absurd. I spoke with Stern to learn more about how this brightly colored pastiche of confusion relates to her ongoing practice and reflections on the world in which we live.

Rachel Stern in conversation with Jon Feinstein

PostedAugust 15, 2018

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesExhibitions, Artists, Galleries

TagsRachel Stern, RISD Photographers, Columbia University MFA Photographers, art inspired by literature, studio photography, conceptual photography, performance in photography, 2018 photography exhibitions, queer photography

Guanyu Xu Creates Domestic Interventions That Reflect His Double Life

Vaughan Larsen Destabilizes The Gendered Rituals of Family Photographs

Wig Heavier Than A Boot: A Collaboration of Poetry, Photography and Queer Identity

Theater of the Absurd: Staged Photographs Reflect Witchcraft, Trumpism, and The Crucible