Derick Whitson
NYC
July 1 - 30, 2018
Recommended by Fountainhead Rona Yefman
Artist Statement
The individual carries a burden- a social imposition. In use is contemporary visual culture; dominant imagery alluding to ways the material body is critiqued through ego besmirchment. The presentation of current culture provides a over determination of the ego showing sexual and personal politics. The body is used, as a toll and a source to communicate ways of physical stimulation and desire. The status of the gendered form answers associations created as a fetishized object in performance through cultural affiliations. Standards of social media implications and social contemporary photographic platforms are celebrated, critiqued, and questioned as I am continuing to produce staged imagery that’s in communication with historical platforms of portrait image making. I’m intrigued by evaluating my own understanding of visual culture. My response to the photographic images stems from my knowledge of my own queer male body history. In use is color vividness, and my application of flamboyance, overt decoration and clothing choices provides the opportunity to expand and add to a viewers interpretation of imagery. Some of my current questions are in response to image makers like Cindy Sherman, Richard Avedon and this potential to photograph people that is negating the term portraiture. I am allowing myself to be influenced by sexually charged queer spaces to then recreate my own interpretation of color eccentric queer imagery existing in a tightly enclosed photographic frame; some examples include drag culture, sex clubs, bar scenes, cruising spaces, and club kid culture.