ChrisSoFly’s self-portraits celebrate his love for fashion, music, and awakening from rigid gender roles.

Growing up, the Sanford, Florida-based multidisciplinary artist never imagined he’d feel comfortable wearing dresses, wigs, and makeup, and sharing photos of himself with the world. “Once I finally put my own fear of judgment aside and became comfortable in my own skin and started dressing how I wanted and expressing myself freely,” Chris writes, “ I realized that this may be my purpose….showing that boys can be princesses too.”

In his self-portraits, which he shares predominantly on Instagram – often with tens of thousands of likes and hundreds of comments – Chris unapologetically and joyfully confronts the camera with bedazzled glory.
The series started earlier this year when Chris began designing fashion pieces while teaching himself to sew through Youtube videos. His creations manifest themselves as pastel dresses, flowers in his hair, posing before floral backdrops that highlight his exuberance and power. I spoke with Chris to learn more about his experience and work.

I spoke with Chris to learn more about his experience and work.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with ChrisSoFly

PostedDecember 3, 2020

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Portfolio

TagsChrisSoFly, self-portraiture, collaborative portraiture, fashion photography, multi-disciplinary artists, toxic masculinity, queer identity and photography, new photography, contemporary portraiture

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

Daniel Temkin uses code and other devices to manipulate how we understand photography and visual perception.

I first came across Daniel Temkin's Straightened Trees series in late 2016 when I was curating "Future isms," Humble's exhibition that used utopian/dystopian images as a metaphor for the dark times and uncertainty surrounding the United States presidential election. Buildings and power lines twist and contort around artificially "corrected" trees, calling into question what is real, what's human-made, and how we conjure a landscape-ideal. Temkin's trees, which he makes by using an algorithm and code injection to alter the digital structure of a straight, large-format photograph respond to a need to control a messy world. A critique of perfectionism. A landscaping rhinoplasty with disastrous consequences.

Like Straightened Trees, Temkin's larger practice is all about the conflict between human thought and logic. It reflects the two worlds he straddles: photography and computer programming. In a recent exhibition at New York City's Higher Pictures Gallery, he paired his trees against his new series Dither Studies.

For those, like myself, who are likely unaware of what "dithering" is, it's one of the most fundamental algorithms of contemporary photography, dating back to the 1970s when it was used to translate color or grayscale images to black and white pixels. The process allows a limited color palette to take on the look of a gradient image. Kind of like a highly pixelated ombre sky. Temkin hand renders these images in acrylic on panel, turning each pixel into a square of color, with highly psychedelic results. While visually dissimilar, Dither Studies relates to Straightened Trees in its push to pull apart the image-making process, confronting the strange and illogical structures of human and machine-based perfectionism.

A presidential term (and a much more frightening world) deep into my admiration for his work, Temkin and I spoke to bring it together.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Daniel Temkin

PostedNovember 19, 2020

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesExhibitions, Artists

TagsDaniel Temkin, art and technology, straightened trees, dither studies, photography and code

Self Evident Truths: 10,000 Portraits of Queer America © iO Tillet Wright — *Self Evident Truths: 10,000 Portraits of Queer America* © iO Tillet Wright

Roula Seikaly speaks with iO Tillet Wright about Self Evident Truths, his ten-year project (and now photography book) of 10,000+ humanizing portraits documenting people in the USA that identify as ANYTHING OTHER than 100% straight.

I was champagne-drunk while listening to United States President-elect Joseph R. Biden formally address the nation on November 7th. It was also my birthday, and there was much to celebrate. When I heard him include trans and queer Americans in a long list of people to whom he owes this victory, as though he was naming family members, I cried. I thought of my transgender wife and all of our friends in queer and other marginalized communities for whom the previous four years particularly have been terrifyingly fraught, and how it may be slightly easier to breathe now.

With that in mind, it’s a pleasure to introduce this interview with photographer iO Tillet-Wright. In 2010, Tillet-Wright embarked on a nationwide project to photograph people who are generally lumped into the category “LGBTQIA++,” which the photographer/activist rightly calls out for how it generalizes the otherwise glorious variations within queer communities.

10 years and 10,000 portraits later, the project Self Evident Truths: 10,000 Portraits of Queer America celebrates individuality that is barely contained within the photographic frame and holds immeasurable possibilities beyond a clumsy acronym. Published by Prestel this October, the 544-page book is monumental for its size, scope, and content - “10,000 faces of survival, charisma, and charm” - alike.

Roula Seikaly in conversation with iO Tillet-Wright

PostedNovember 12, 2020

AuthorRoula Seikaly

CategoriesArt News, Artists, Galleries, Photobooks

TagsiO Tillet-Wright, Roula Seikaly, New Photography, Self Evident Truths, photobooks, queer identity and photography, empathetic portraiture, Contemporary Portraiture

This Ain't Your Frank's Red, Amor © Erick Guzman

A new online exhibition, to be curated by Erick Guzman asks: what does it mean to be Latinx today? What is Latinidad?

Using Gloría Anzaldúa's seminal text, Borderlands as inspiration, we seek artists who identify as Latino/a/x and embrace intersectionality in their community.

To be Latinx is more than a monolith; it is a vibrant and robust community filled with diverse and unique voices. Latinx encompasses many intersectional identities. It should be celebrated to allow for visibility of these artists' talents and hopefully inspire future artists, art educators, and possibly bridge the severe lack of representation we see in academia and Photography specifically. Latinx People are queer, Black, white, Asian, Womxn, Indigenous, and Trans. It is now more important than ever to showcase the diversity of these populations and uplift their voices.

With the current political climate and the rising population of Latinx individuals in the US (reaching 30% by 2050), compounded with abysmal representation in higher ed (less than 5% of tenured professors are Latinx), what does it mean to be Latinx+ to you?

Deadline: December 1, 2020

PostedNovember 2, 2020

AuthorEditors

CategoriesOpen Call, Exhibitions

Tagsphotography open call, open call, photo opportunities, new latinx photography, Erick Guzman, Vibrance Art Exchange, emerging photography

These Self-Portraits Show That Boys Can Be Princesses Too

The Celestial Complexity of Queer Identity

Straightening Trees in a Glitched Out World

10 Years and 10,000 Portraits of Queer America

Open Call: Group Show #66 – La Frontera: A New Latinx Lexicon