UC Santa Cruz

The Big Gay is an ongoing project intended to interrogate and update the visual culture of gay, leather, and queer kink community spaces, specifically bars. The first iteration featured a collaboration and curation with 8 different artists, each expressing their own vision of what erotic masculinity could be on wooden cutouts created at a superhuman scale. I traveled throughout California assisting in the creation of these pieces, the majority of which went on to be featured in my MFA thesis exhibition, Eagle UCSC.For the exhibition, a small wooden bar was installed in the center of the installation. The pieces were suspended in the air, giving viewers a sense of a space while also allowing them to feel as though the pieces were erotic participants in the communal physical experience. On the bar were physical magazines and flickering projections expressing the history of the visuals in these spaces, as well as a small television displaying documentation of the manufacturing of the pieces around the bar. I placed myself as a bartender in this space, serving drinks but also explaining the purpose of the project, the history of leather spaces, and the manufacturing of the pieces suspended around the viewers. The first iteration of The Big Gay will be completed once the pieces are installed in queer kink spaces, in dialogue with existing artwork and directly intervening into the historical and rarely updated visual culture of these spaces.