Play Glamorous (WIP 2021-)
Play Glamorous explores the contradictions of masculinity through my experience playing ice hockey as a closeted athlete for 11 years. In hockey, a particularly violent and hyper-masculine sport, the possibility of queerness is denied and even feared, perpetuating a toxic environment that forces queer players to closet themselves. The performative acts of masculinity that happen within violent sports such as punching, hitting, and slamming reinforce idealized versions of what it means to be a man. Sports also set the conditions in which men can touch and become vulnerable with one another, leading to softer and homoerotic interactions, but when this emotional or physical closeness falls outside of this space it is questioned and attacked.
Having to carefully navigate the locker room and hockey culture meant a constant lingering anxiety that never let me escape its clutches. I felt alienated and was continuously in fear as I felt I was on the verge of being caught. Through self-portraiture, compositing, motion, shadow play, the locker room becomes a portal that complicates our notions of masculinity and my experiences in them. Color is introduced as a strategy to romanticize the locker room, seduce viewers, just as I was in these spaces, and heighten the sense of fear I felt so palpably. By doing so, the photographs create an ebb and flow as they fluctuate between reality, fantasy, and trepidation. Making room for queer possibility in a space it has been historically excluded from and highlighting my fear as if something, or someone is after me. My role becomes muddled as the viewer encounters me as the victim, the perpetrator, the onlooker, and ultimately the object of desire. The locker room becomes its own world built around terror and seduction, where I must confront the multitude of roles I had to fulfill and the aspects of my identity that I refused to acknowledge. What results is a visualization of my conformity, the fear of desire that plagued me for so long, my fraught memories, and a questioning of the role that sports play in the creation of male identity.
No Greater Theater, 2024, Single-Channel Video, Run Time: 3:38
No Greater Theater (2024)
No Greater Theater, depicts the blatant homoeroticism that is often present in ice hockey and in the men's locker rooms. Athletes grapple, straddle, hug, kiss, and engage in other intimate moments with one another throughout the game. The intense fighting amongst players that is so common in hockey are intertwined with those intensely intimate moments to consider the similarities between the two, while providing a tension that is palpable to the viewer. I reflect on this intimacy that is created and supported through the sport, under the guise of an assumed straightness, because of how hypocritical it is compared to how men's sports deny queerness any visibility. This physical closeness and affection that is depicted allows queer possibility to shine through, creating a normalcy for queerness in an ultra-masculine space that has long denied its presence. The audio that complements the video features multilayered breath sounds, creating a tension that is at once sexual and full of fear. The two can’t be distinguished from each other and leads to a climax that is never reached, while recreating an uncomfortableness I felt so physically in these moments.
Installation View of Play Glamorous at Columbia College Chicago's Student Center 5th floor Gallery
