THOMAS HELLSTROM
Sustained Attention:
Projects 2000-2012
Current Exhibition:
S Ioannes De Deo
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-through June 2nd, 2012-
The Portrait
Society
http://portraitsocietygallery.com/
Feature Article:
Aubade: Boys
Featured in Britain’s
art, design and lifestyle publication reFRESH
Thomas Hellstrom: Photographs in the
Present Tense
By Steven Gdula
-Click
image above for full article text-
Projects 2000 - 2012
Eighth House:
Pond
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Orpheus
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Pier Ruin
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November
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Coda
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Aubade: a morning love song or poem about lovers separating at dawn. Aubades were in the repertory of the troubadours of the
Middle Ages, the form first appeared in the English language in the 1380s.
Aubade:
PCS
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Aubade: Bilal
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Aubade: Jen
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Solo Exhibition:
PULSE NY 2008
Aubade: Single
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Aubade: Drift
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Sugar is Combustible:
Photo Diary 1999-2012
from: December, 1999
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Third City:
This Afternoon
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Solo exhibition:
SCOPE NY 2007
Souvenir
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Publication:
Anonymous 2007
Contact: Feature Inc., NYC
Unremembering
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Solo Exhibition:
Buzzer Thirty, NY
2005
Epilogue: Passenger
Snuff: A short story by Rob Maitra
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Statuary:
Capitoline
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Pergamon
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Exhibition:
Scope Miami 2005
Pablo’s Birthday
Cinema:
Thereafter
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Thereafter: 01:22:35 – 01:22:40
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Solo exhibition:
The Armory Show, NYC, 2006
Emissary
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Publication:
Camera Austria #81
Reconnoiter
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CV & Contact:
CV
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Contact:
thomashellstromnyc-at-gmail.com
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ArtFacts.net: Europe’s leading site for Contemporary Art
Thereafter #06
2000-03 Digital c print mounted to plexiglass,
16 x 23 inches / 40.7 x 58.4 cm
Exhibited: TODAY’S MAN
John Connelly Presents. NYC 2003
Hiromi Yoshii Gallery, Tokyo 2003
Feature review:
THE NEW YORK TIMES
August 8, 2003
ART REVIEW | 'TODAY'S MAN'
By and About Men, and
They're Running With It
By HOLLAND COTTER
TODAY’S MAN
Hiromi Yoshii Gallery
Tokyo, Japan
October – November 2003
John
Connelly Presents
526 West 26th Street,
10th Floor, NYC
July 19th -
September 13th 2003
Catalogue
The White House is
concerned. The Vatican is upset. And honestly, who can blame them, with so much
normality up for grabs? Marriage and the family are under revision. Sodomy is,
suddenly, not a crime. Gays are in Congress, in pulpits, on prime-time
television. When I tell you that a show titled "Bravehearts:
Men in Skirts" opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this fall, you'll
see how far things have gone.
The good news is that
in contemporary art they've gone even further, judging by the evidence of
"Today's Man," a dandy group show at John Connelly Presents in
Chelsea. It includes some 50 small pieces by as many artists, from senior
figures like Alex Katz and A. A. Bronson to a raft of youthful prodigies:
Mathew Cerletty, Nick Mauss,
Spencer Sweeney and the one-namers Asianpunkboy and Phiiliip, to
mention a few.
The theme is simple:
men making art about men. Naturally, it raises expectations of a gay show,
which "Today's Man" both is and is not. Explicit homoeroticism is all
but absent. Straight artists tackle gayish themes.
And the artists who are gay seem to have scant interest in "we're here
we're queer get used to it" declarations.
The fact is, everyone
concerned is used to it. Gay culture has traveled so deep into the mainstream
in recent years that a presumed opposite like straight, once headed in a
different direction, seems to have come along and in certain cosmetic ways
merged with it. What accounts for this? Time, for one thing. Most of the
artists at Connelly are too young to have experienced AIDS or the identity
politics of the 1990's firsthand. They're beyond self-acceptance in terms of
sexual identity; they've never known it as a threatened condition.
But such confidence
has pluses and minuses. Thanks in part to path-clearing feminist and gay art of
the past, young artists can draw on a vast pool of cultural references: to
fashion, crafts, pop music, Saturday morning cartoons, art history,
advertising, digital technology, flower power psychedelia,
horror movies, spirituality, science fiction, pornography. The list goes on.
With so much tinder,
sparks are bound to fly, and inventive artists like Christian Holstad, Scott Hug and Eli Sudbrack,
a k a Assume Vivid Astro Focus — all in the Connelly
show — have been generating considerable heat. But they have done so in funny
ways, some of which recall the camp phenomenon defined by Susan Sontag in the
early 1960's. "Camp is a solvent of morality," she wrote. "It
neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness." That fits. So does
her description of camp as depoliticized or apolitical, though, of course,
political can be defined in many ways.
But I am
oversimplifying the current situation, which is pretty complicated.
"Today's Man," in a shorthand way, provides a lot of information
about it, including a sense of the variety of masculinities in circulation.
Some are not so new. The three suave men in Alex Katz's 1985 painting
"Twelve Hours No. 1" might have stepped from a Paul Stuart catalog;
Richard Phillip's portrait of the rapper Curtis Jackson relies on off-the-rack gangsta glamour.
A meticulous drawing
by Mr. Hug titled "Michael Magnan" also
adheres to a prototype, the action-hero cartoon, but slyly customizes it. The
hero named in his title is the young artist Michael Magnan,
creator of the fashion line Do Not Provoke Us, who contributes a drawing of his
own: a high-1960's paisley-patterned image of a cosmic everyman cut out in
silhouette from clouds.
Three tiny Photo
Realist paintings by Everest Hall depict action-heroes of a different kind,
namely those found in gay pornography, including that antique model of Marlboro
Man machismo, the "clone." This erotic ideal is entertainingly
updated in a florid, wet-dream drawing by Mr. Sudbrack;
in a fabric collage by James Gobel; and obliquely in
cave-man images by Bill Adams and Billy Grant.
Certain artists seem
to have looked with care at fashion illustration: David West in his reedy,
Bernard Buffet-ish ink portraits of friends; Kentaro Kobuke in a Picassoid figure, all angles and points; and Adrian Garcia
Gomez in his vivid tattoolike "Geve," with its snaky body and aura of gilt flames.
A stylishly
nonchalant ink sketch by Phiiliip, a songwriter and
musician of expanding renown, gives a lot of space to writing, some of it
crammed into a thought-balloon attached to its supine male figure: "I feel
so elegant, so fancy free." For light-touch virtuosity, though, nothing
matches Mr. Mauss's drawing "Kenneth Okiishi, Reluctant Effeminist,"
a half-materialized portrait of a fellow artist set among miniexplosions
of bright color.
Several other people
at Connelly — Paul Brainard, Sam Gordon, Paul P.,
Justin Lieberman, Matthew Keegan, Pieter Schoolwerth,
Christophe Hamaide Pierson, Arnoud
Holleman — also deliver polished figural work; Tim Lokiec, has 1960's Rockport School expressionism down cold.
Interestingly, no two pieces look at all alike; it's as if each artist lived in
his own remote galaxy, with periodic visits to the common conceptual pool.
Maybe it's just the art that Mr. Connelly has chosen, but idiosyncrasy seems to
be a style of its own.
This goes for
narrative work, too, from Rob Thom's painting of drama in a fast-food
restaurant to Hernan Bas's
picture of a boy threatened by an octopus from his "Little Moby Dick in
the Net" series. Dan Attoe's nocturne,
"Looking Through the Dump" and Thomas Hellstrom's apparitional "Thereafter No. 06," one
of the few photographs, share a Romantic, visionary mood, but nothing else.
Visionary is also the
word for Jeff Davis's drawing of a pile of placidly smiling male heads bathed
in celestial light and Jules de Balincourt's
"Men's Safety Center," with its somewhat alarming image of what looks
like an internment camp with a rainbow-beamed searchlight.
My best-of-show in
the narrative division, however, is split between two completely unalike
pieces: Michael Wetzel's painting "Fairfield vs. New Canaan," in
which a Civil War battle rages among flowered bedsheets
hung out to dry; and Nick Lowe's astonishing "Arabian Workout," a
pumping-iron tableau of insanely precise detail executed in the most basic of
media, pencil on paper.
Not everyone is so
formally orthodox. Philippe Perrot paints with topical antiseptic; Asianpunkboy uses a mixture of bodily fluid and
Pepto-Bismol to embellish a portrait embossed on paper. There are only two
sculptures, both good: a white plaster life-mask titled "Vincent" by
Mr. Sweeney, and Marco Boggio Sella's
imposing bronze bust of a military type with a Pinocchio nose.
With its urgent tone,
a text-and-image collage by the filmmaker T. J. Wilcox could be from another
world: it's about a fire-breathing transsexual activist from Seattle who climbs
electric poles to deliver consciousness-raising messages, of a kind that can
leave political and religious powers-that-be unnerved. And at least one other
artist, Mr. Holstad, seems interested in keeping such
tensions alive.
In a recent show at
Greene Naftali, he presented an installation of all
the images he found filed under the label "gay" in the picture
archives of the New York Public Library. When he copied the images, he sorted
them into categories: "Drag queens; porn; Gay Rights/protests; AIDS;
trying to be like straight people (passing); Military; Art." Protest
pictures turned out to be the largest selection.
If there is little direct evidence of an activist spirit in
"Today's Man," that may be a sign of the times, a generational thing,
and could change. Meanwhile, the show's decentered
concept of masculinity amounts to a political statement in itself. And there's
Mr. Holstad's contribution to consider: a
photo-collage of a faunlike nude boy — the imp of perversity, surely — peering
out from behind a sofa in a White House reception room.
© copyright Thomas Hellstrom 2012