218 Spring 2015 218 - Peres Projects
218 218 Spring 2015
Queer
Aperture Magazine Spring 2015
Opposite and pages 118 & 119: A Kind of Obscene Diary, 2011, from the series Cruise or Be Cruised Page 120: YMAP (Art), 2005 (detail) Page 121: Young Men at Play #1, 2004 Page 122: Young Men at Play #8, 2004 Page 123: YMAP (Healing #1), 2005 © Dean Sameshima and courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin
Dean Sameshima’s art yearns to grab a past era by its tail. Glamorous ghosts from 1970s soft- and harder-core porn appear in his large-scale, silkscreened canvases of appropriated photographs, organized in series with titles such as Young Men at Play and Cruise or Be Cruised. Most of the men in his images are anonymous, like the sex they offer. They embody ideals of sexual abandon rather than affectionate intimacy, yet Sameshima approaches this idyllic decadence from a distance. Through silkscreening, using archival material, and transforming small-scale and privately viewed images into grand and public statements, he documents his own personal longing for an era of burgeoning liberation and seemingly extreme thrills for gay men.
Dean Sameshima Ana Finel Honigman
When Sameshima first encountered his source images, AIDS had already altered the nature of gay identity and sexual expression. He was young, curious, and coming out in California in the 1990s, when the consequences of casual sex were widely known, and before the Internet brought subcultures into teenagers’ palms. Without the luxury of today’s private, easy online access, he consulted the yellow pages, contacting queer counselors to ask how to meet other men. One recommended that he frequent bookstores such as A Different Light, the LGBT bookstore that was a hub for cruising in Los Angeles’s Silver Lake neighborhood from 1979 until it closed in 2011. While he was in high school, Sameshima began looking at nude bodies in art volumes before moving toward porn. The images that inspire and are fodder for his art range from photographs of young men in ’70s-era physique pictorials to shots of the leathermen sexual subculture from the same decade— in other words, from the voyeuristic worship of beautiful bodies to bodies participating in recreational and pleasurable sadomasochism. In each instance, by silkscreening the images, making the pixelation apparent, the colors monochromatic, and the scale monumental, Sameshima underscores the viewer’s position as alienated from the action in the image. “I wanted to do something photo-related but not photography,” he explains. “Something else to document.” Rather than just report on gay sexuality, he decided to appropriate cultural artifacts documenting its recent history. The resulting images suggest an almost prelapsarian heyday of gay hedonism. Sameshima sees himself as akin to a scholar conserving past material. “I think one of the things that happens when I rephotograph something and present it on a wall is that I feel like I am giving it a new life,” he says. “Instead of being hidden in someone’s porn stash, it becomes alive again.” By resurrecting the images, he gives them new life as representatives of communal fantasies and works of art.
Ana Finel Honigman is a Berlin-based art writer.
P I C TU R E S 1 1 7
Aperture Magazine Spring 2015
Aperture Magazine Spring 2015
Aperture Magazine Spring 2015
Aperture Magazine Spring 2015
Aperture Magazine Spring 2015
Aperture Magazine Spring 2015
Aperture Magazine Spring 2015
Aperture Magazine Spring 2015
Queer
Aperture Magazine Spring 2015
Opposite and pages 118 & 119: A Kind of Obscene Diary, 2011, from the series Cruise or Be Cruised Page 120: YMAP (Art), 2005 (detail) Page 121: Young Men at Play #1, 2004 Page 122: Young Men at Play #8, 2004 Page 123: YMAP (Healing #1), 2005 © Dean Sameshima and courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin
Dean Sameshima’s art yearns to grab a past era by its tail. Glamorous ghosts from 1970s soft- and harder-core porn appear in his large-scale, silkscreened canvases of appropriated photographs, organized in series with titles such as Young Men at Play and Cruise or Be Cruised. Most of the men in his images are anonymous, like the sex they offer. They embody ideals of sexual abandon rather than affectionate intimacy, yet Sameshima approaches this idyllic decadence from a distance. Through silkscreening, using archival material, and transforming small-scale and privately viewed images into grand and public statements, he documents his own personal longing for an era of burgeoning liberation and seemingly extreme thrills for gay men.
Dean Sameshima Ana Finel Honigman
When Sameshima first encountered his source images, AIDS had already altered the nature of gay identity and sexual expression. He was young, curious, and coming out in California in the 1990s, when the consequences of casual sex were widely known, and before the Internet brought subcultures into teenagers’ palms. Without the luxury of today’s private, easy online access, he consulted the yellow pages, contacting queer counselors to ask how to meet other men. One recommended that he frequent bookstores such as A Different Light, the LGBT bookstore that was a hub for cruising in Los Angeles’s Silver Lake neighborhood from 1979 until it closed in 2011. While he was in high school, Sameshima began looking at nude bodies in art volumes before moving toward porn. The images that inspire and are fodder for his art range from photographs of young men in ’70s-era physique pictorials to shots of the leathermen sexual subculture from the same decade— in other words, from the voyeuristic worship of beautiful bodies to bodies participating in recreational and pleasurable sadomasochism. In each instance, by silkscreening the images, making the pixelation apparent, the colors monochromatic, and the scale monumental, Sameshima underscores the viewer’s position as alienated from the action in the image. “I wanted to do something photo-related but not photography,” he explains. “Something else to document.” Rather than just report on gay sexuality, he decided to appropriate cultural artifacts documenting its recent history. The resulting images suggest an almost prelapsarian heyday of gay hedonism. Sameshima sees himself as akin to a scholar conserving past material. “I think one of the things that happens when I rephotograph something and present it on a wall is that I feel like I am giving it a new life,” he says. “Instead of being hidden in someone’s porn stash, it becomes alive again.” By resurrecting the images, he gives them new life as representatives of communal fantasies and works of art.
Ana Finel Honigman is a Berlin-based art writer.
P I C TU R E S 1 1 7
Aperture Magazine Spring 2015
Aperture Magazine Spring 2015
Aperture Magazine Spring 2015
Aperture Magazine Spring 2015
Aperture Magazine Spring 2015
Aperture Magazine Spring 2015
Aperture Magazine Spring 2015
Aperture Magazine Spring 2015
