Project Information: After Winslow Homer

During the 1890's, Winslow Homer made a series of iconic watercolor paintings featuring Adirondack Guides, professional woodsmen who hunted and led fishing trips for wilderness visitors. These heroic, rugged figures embodied the ultimate image of the American man, and played upon the pastoral fantasies of a rapidly urbanizing America. To my contemporary eye, Homer's images suggest a homoerotic virility that verges on camp. With my collaborator, Monika Sziladi, I reconstructed a series of these works, as a series of photographs shot on modern suburban sites in New England: Walden Pond (now a popular park), a golf course, and a shopping mall, playing with the double meaning of the word "camp." These images emerged from contemplation of what I thought of as a celebration of the queerness of suburban nature: instead of hearkening back to a mythic past with an unspoiled landscape, living in the beautiful and paradoxical complexities of our current ecological times, which despite their heartbreak, also allow us to live full lives as LGBTQIA people.

Made in collaboration with Monika Sziladi