President's Showcase
Clay Barczak They/Them
Supervising Professor: Daniel Luedtke
Clay Barczak is currently located and working in Tallahassee, Florida. Their paintings and collages investigate their lived experiences as a queer and gender-nonconforming individual in the American South. Their work synthesizes source imagery from political, historical, and vintage erotica with historical paintings to create an imposing presence in their compositions with a clear critique of a contemporary issue. Each work employs a vibrant color palette in conjunction with themes of disjointedness in order to expound upon their internal negotiations with the strict historical record of identities and the possibility of reinstating some ambiguity into the art historical canon.
Abstract
Consistent throughout Western art history predating the late 1800s there is a significant lack of queerness and representation of gender expressions outside of the binary. Within this creative research project, I have investigated this lack of representation and reconstructed historical paintings from a queer perspective to solidify queerness in the Western art historical canon. Throughout my project, I created a series of three 48” x 60” paintings that engage with the genre of history painting by referencing artists renowned as masters in their craft to align queer ideologies with that of historically significant painting practices. This work was based on a series of digital collages to root the work in a contemporary sphere while working from antiquity. This final series of paintings serve as long-standing documentation of the sequences of traumas and everyday experiences of the queer community from the 1800s onwards. Through equating queer experiences with that of a heterocentric history I am solidifying themes of equality and queerness in the Western canon from both a contemporary and historical lens.
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