In Pursuit of Muscle

In Pursuit of Muscle asks how masculinity can be engaged with and embodied through the photograph. The work uses countersexuality to question the photograph’s claims to authorship and ownership, allowing masculinity to be possessed through images

In Pursuit of Muscle asks how masculinity can be engaged with and embodied through the photograph. The work uses countersexuality to question the photograph’s claims to authorship and ownership, allowing masculinity to be possessed through images. I perform a boyhood I desired but never inhabited, using costume, set design, and casting drawn from 1970s–90s masculine archetypes, varsity jackets, ringer tees, bikes, helmets, and exercise props. I hone in specifically on depictions of exercise, given its universal capacity to contort bodies in pursuit of gender illumination, mobilising stretching, pumping, and posing as signs of masculine embodiment. Colour grading and American iconography reference the visualities so pivotal to my upbringing, films such as Stand by Me, The Goonies and My Bodyguard. Performers’ distant gazes destabilise such masculinity and redirect the work toward countersexuality. I’ve begun negotiating and representing the material, possessive properties of the photograph through durational installations and self-portraits, kept in my bedroom for varying lengths of time. Through different scales, photographs kept in a wallet, postcards, editorial pages and finally posters, these installations pictoralise the possessive desires and intentions of the project. The work's theoretical ambitions become further accessible through optional interventions as viewers navigate a visual installation accompanied by written work in which language folds into this discourse. Meaning surfaces situationally and optionally.