JTF (just the facts): A group show, consisting of 45 works by 16 artists/photographers, variously framed and matted, and hung against white walls in the front and back gallery spaces.

The following photographers/artists are included in the show, with the number of works on view (with details):

• Florencia Alvarado: 3 archival pigment prints, 2018, sized 14×11 inches, in editions of 5
• Kelli Connell/Natalie Krick: 4 archival pigment prints, 2021, 2022, sized roughly 11×9, 30×24, 14×11 inches, in editions of 6; 1 vinyl wallpaper, 2022, dimensions variable
• Anthony Goicolea: 2 ink, graphite, and oil paint on double sided frosted Mylar film mounted to board, 2019, sized 50×40 inches, unique
• Ken Graves: 4 mixed media collages, 1989, 2010, sized roughly 8×7, 8×5, 7×5 inches, unique
• Aaron Krach: 4 collages, 2022, sized roughly 10×9, 11×8, 10×8 inches, unique
• Justine Kurland: 1 collage, 2022, sized roughly 48×44 inches, unique
• Lovie Olivia: 2 medical files folders, squid ink, graphite, glitter, acetate, vellum, 2023, sized 14×11 inches, unique
• John O’Reilly: 2 Polaroid photographs, 1988, 1990, sized roughly 4×3 inches, unique
• Antonio Pulgarín: 1 archival pigment print on bamboo plywood, 2021, sized 32×40 inches, in an edition of 2; 1 archival pigment print, 2023, sized 30×20 inches, in an edition of 2
• Jonah Samson: 4 gelatin silver collages, n.d, sized roughly 9×9, 7×9, 7×10 inches, unique
• John Cassidy Smith: 5 paper collages, 2023, sized roughly 11×8 inches, unique
• Boris Torres: 2 collages, 2018, sized 72×52 inches, unique
• Charles Wilkin: 4 collages on paper, 2017, 2020, sized roughly 11×8, 10×7, 8×6 inches, unique
• Guanyu Xu: 1 archival pigment print, 2018, sized 40×50 inches, in an edition of 5
• Michael Young: 2 archival pigment prints, 2024, sized 40×32 inches, in editions of 2; 2 archival pigment prints, 2021, sized 20×16 inches, in editions of 3

(Installation shots below.)

Comments/Context: Let’s start with a simple declarative statement – contemporary photocollage doesn’t get the artistic attention it deserves. It’s puzzling – when we look back across the history of photography, the cutting and pasting of earlier subgenres of photocollage are consistently represented and honored. We routinely celebrate Hannah Höch and the Dada photocollagists, László Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus collage teachings, the Soviet Constructivist collage artists and graphic designers, the risk taking Surrealist photocollage and photomontage efforts (from around the world), and many other political and propaganda-driven photocollage examples from different nations and periods.

And yet, when we move closer to the present, it’s as if we somehow lose the discrete definitional separation that photocollage once had. Perhaps the ideas, processes (now both physical and digital), and source imagery have become too widely diffuse? Or have we stopped noticing the innovative new ways photographic images can be recombined, because our attention has now been diluted by the ease with which image combinations and memes now proliferate around us? For whatever reason, contemporary photocollage (defined as perhaps going back the last half century) feels decidedly under appreciated, and even perhaps a bit misunderstood.

Sharp Cuts: Queer Collage is the best group show of photography to be found this summer in New York first and foremost because it doesn’t assume we’re bored tourists trawling through the galleries in search of easy entertainment and air conditioning. Instead, it actually asks us to stop and think, in particular about the ways photocollage can function when seen through a queer lens. And when we step back and reconsider questions like who is doing the seeing, what their vantage point might be, what source materials they have chosen to work with, and who the resulting artworks are for, the resulting ideas broaden our possible understandings of photocollage with richness and intelligence.

Several of the included artists use photocollage to probe the queer male gaze and associated notions and motifs of masculinity. Michael Young starts with vintage gay pornographic calendars, creating layered figures (policemen, soldiers, lifeguards, and the like) where bodies fill each other in misaligned absences and doublings, like hidden and revealed selves. Charles Wilkin begins in a related aesthetic location, with vintage black-and-white male nudes taken in bare studio settings, which he then adorns (and interrupts) with images of lushly colorful fabrics and intermingled textures, like satins, silks, furs, and pearls. And Aaron Krach mixes images from a Sculpture of the 20th Century catalog from MoMA with those from a book of male erotic photographs from 1980, intermingling abstract forms with faces and bodies.

Another group of artists turns photocollage into an act of reconsideration, reinterpretation, and reimagining, pushing back against historical views dominated by white heterosexual male perspectives and privileges. Justine Kuland exorcises the influence of white male photographers from her own artistic practice by literally cutting up their photobooks and turning them into new artworks, in this case refashioning scraps from William Eggleston’s The Outlands into a loose symbol of female sexuality. Kelli Connell and Natalie Krick take aim at the influence of Edward Steichen and his famous exhibit The Family of Man, multiplying faceless men in suits, removing a woman being surrounded by men, and turning an image of a woman in a staircase into a swirlingly geometric wall installation. And Jonah Samson reimagines various moments of Hollywood seduction as gay male encounters, with stills of Cary Grant, Jeremy Irons, and a young Jeff Bridges recast with male lovers.

Queer desire pushes to the forefront in the work on a number of photocollagists, from the more explicit linked silhouettes of Boris Torres and cut-into-strips interleavings of John Cassidy Smith to the elegantly reserved studies of hands by Florencia Alvarado. The show then pivots inward, to self-portraits and studies of self that wrestle with queer dualities and conflicts of personality. Anthony Goicolea becomes a jittering doubled form, John O’Reilly gathers resonant objects into indirect amalgamations of symbols and urges, and Guanyu Xu papers the walls of his apartment with imagery, building up a safe space of layered pictures.

Much of the success of this show is rooted in its effervescent heterogeneity – there is no one single way to make a queer photocollage, nor is there any one way to be a queer photographer, as much as the larger world might want to create categories and labels that apply to all. There are common processes employed here, some similar source materials, and in some cases, even some common conceptual frameworks, but in general, each body of work on view represents a unique individual defining his or her own queer vantage point. What I like about so much of this contemporary photocollage work is its consistent feeling of confidence and self-acceptance, of reassembling the existing imagery of the world in a way that better reflects more nuanced lived realities.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced as follows:

• Florencia Alvarado: $800
• Kelli Connell/Natalie Krick: $1750, $3500, $2000, POR
• Anthony Goicolea: $16500
• Ken Graves: $5500, $6000
• Aaron Krach: $800
• Justine Kurland: $14000
• Lovie Olivia: $2500, $3000
• John O’Reilly: NFS
• Antonio Pulgarín: $2400, $2000
• Jonah Samson $1500
• John Cassidy Smith: $100, POR
• Boris Torres: $4500
• Charles Wilkin: $1200
• Guanyu Xu: $6500
• Michael Young: $3000, $1500

Very few of these photographers/artists have consistent secondary market results for their work, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.