Exhibition Statement - Joel Seah

The United States is in a time when domestic gay life in being brought to visibility through the debate of same-sex marriages, a process that is changing social meaning as well as the representation of domestic life. In creating work from my own understanding of coming out, assessments on personal relationships and encounters with other gay men, I hope to encourage renewed discussions about the problematic location of growing gay discourses within a predominantly straight society. Through the veiling of the private self in public and social spaces, the following works seek narratives that intersect historically shared pasts and contemporary intervals, and connect with proposed futures.

The Hanky Code was an unwritten but widely acknowledged system that gay men utilized in the sixties and seventies to signify their orientation and to furthermore indicate their sexual preferences; each color handkerchief corresponding to a specific sexual activity. In the updated Proposal for a New Hanky Code, I have replaced the acts of physical consumption with my criteria for characteristics in an ideal partner.

A different set of characteristics, those that constitute the gay canons of hyper-sexuality and fetish-sized masculinity, is juxtaposed with the personal and specific in Homo Depot. Here, I catalogue words from the store that serve as innuendo with the actual domestic intentions of friends and strangers I have met while shopping there.

My own domestic intentions with previous boyfriends are in turn disguised under the impression of scientific plant names in How Does Your Garden Grow. These names were hand-painted on wooden stakes and planted with artificial flowers in front of a summer cottage in Saugatuck, Michigan; a popular Mid-Western vacation spot for many gay men.  

The final piece in the exhibition, Brother, is a video in which members of the gay fraternity, Delta Lamda Phi from the Syracuse University Chapter, are paired with straight members from various other fraternities on campus. The fraternity members themselves never reveal on camera to which organizations they have sworn their allegiance, encouraging the viewer to confront their own preconceptions about what it means to be gay. The accompanying text piece Signature Encounters, documents conversations I have had with individual members of Delta Lamda Phi while teaching them to typeset. We each then chose a significant phrase from our session to be printed, collectively producing a series observing cultural similarities and differences.

These strategies of mimicry and simulation are best described by Craig Owens in his seminal essay Posing in which he states that calculated duplicity is an indispensable deconstructive tool. Owens continues to elaborate that the mimic appropriates official discourse, and introduces the discourse of the Other, but in such a way that the hegemonic model’s authority and power to function are cast into doubt. This is an attitude to the act of posturing as a response to the agency of social surveillance. Owens also relies on Jacques Lacan’s essay The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, in order to make the distinction that to imitate is not only to reproduce an image, but additionally for the subject to be inserted in a function whose exercise grasps it.

While these ideas refer specifically to more concrete visual representations in photography and painting, I have structured the framework surrounding the works in Unveiling along the same tactics. As a process of recognition for the viewer, I hope that this body of work opens the possibilities for exploring language and consequently identity, as a constantly shifting understanding.


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