Los Ojos is proud to present A Garden Sown!, the second iteration of the gallery’s series featuring LGBTQ artists. The exhibition is accompanied by a series of to-be-announced performances collectively known as Garden Variety.
The flourishing and fluid circles of identity within the queer community encompass a wide variety of subcultures, each with their own visual dialects and social signifiers. In A Garden Sown!, we celebrate artists fluent in the diverse languages of these subcultures. Their work both obliquely and directly engages a group within the larger community, and in the aggregate celebrates the plurality of voices within it.
Thomas McCarty’s photographs are candid looks at both personal and performative aspects of identity. Gay male fetish culture is a frequent subject of his work. With varying scale and tonality, the photographs reveal a playful curiosity towards role play, bondage and submission. His style evinces a sincerity that blurs the boundaries between observation and participation. McCarty received his BFA from The School of Visual Art and lives and works in Brooklyn.
Christian Lord, a dynamic artist working across a variety of media, presents new sculpture in the exhibition. The pieces, constructed of rubber, wood and metal, explore themes of subjugation and commerce. They also invite a reading in which the interplay of power inherent in any relationship (and its inversion) plays out in material representation. Lord received his MFA from Columbia and lives and works in Brooklyn. He has exhibited internationally and has been included in the Nicaraguan and Central American Biennials.
Buzz Slutzsky debuts new sculpture in the exhibition made using pyrography, a technique of burning images into lumber. The etchings draw parallels to tattoos—they are public displays with private significance. They depict a constellation of iconography from popular and transgender culture and are both a kind of public diary and defiant statement of difference. Slutzky earned their MFA from Parsons and lives in Brooklyn.
Sean Capone debuts Daphne in 4 Parts at the gallery. The video presents the mythical spirit-creature from Ovid’s Metamorphosis after having transformed herself into a tree. Psychedelic colors and patterns continually move across the screen and morph the subject’s face, creating a mesmerizing effect. The work, a kind of modern myth in documentary form, calls attention to the fluidity of gender, identity, and human and natural representation. Capone received his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives in Brooklyn.