In Conversation With: Pacifico Silano: b. 1986, USA

GK: Your Pages of a Blueboy Magazine piece forms part of The Portrait exhibition at The Ravestijn Gallery. Could you tell me a bit about this particular work – what is it we’re looking at?

PS: Sure! So the installation was created in 2013, right after I graduated from my MFA. I guess it was my first serious appropriation-based project as a fledgling artist going out into the world! It comprises 100 individually-framed 21,6 x 28 cm (8.5 x 11 inch) archival inkjet prints, printed on a similar surface to the Blueboy Magazine stock paper, referencing to the physicality of the publication I’m pulling from. The prints also mirror the original magazine’s page size, and there’s 100, because each issue of Blueboy had 100 pages back then – so the work was quite tight conceptually in adopting those parameters.

"Each image shows a tightly-cropped headshot of a male model that appeared in Blueboy Magazine between its inception in the mid 1970s, to around about 1983, when the magazine first wrote about ‘GRID’. GRID stood for ‘gay-related immunodeficiency syndrome’ – it was what people were calling AIDS when they thought it was exclusively a gay disease."

I found this window of time really interesting; between the gay sexual revolution of the 1970s, and the halt of all that progress with the impact of the AIDS crisis. So I started to gather and scan images of various male models that appeared in the magazine, cropping their faces to create these headshots. I then settled on a grid structure for the installation; I love the idea of the gaze of each model looking out at the viewer. There’s nobody whose gaze is diverted, and that’s an important aspect. 

GK: And what questions are you exploring here?

 
PS: The work was conceived as a kind of stand-in memorial of loss and longing for the male models who might have – or likely have – passed away from complications of HIV/AIDS. Some of them I know did; others operate as stand-ins. 

What’s also interesting when you’re working with appropriation, though, is that you end up re-evaluating works in relation to new shifts in time and culture. That’s why I’m so drawn to appropriation, because it feels so fraught, so complicated, so dangerous. You can put something out and think it means one thing, but a decade later you can read the same piece through an entirely different lens. In this regard, I knew there were these issues of representation within the Blueboy work; despite the inclusion of some men of colour, the magazine was predominantly for a white gay audience. All of the models perform these white masculine archetypes and tropes. It’s the cowboy hat, or the moustache, the aviators, the leather jacket, or it’s the models styled as police officers and firefighters. 

Fast-forward to 2022 and we’re all thinking much more about representation; about who the models are, who should be seen. So the work’s still a memorial, but it also takes on those complicated questions of identity politics, inviting many other reflections on who this magazine was for, and what it was they desired. Beyond addressing loss or longing, it can also be an indictment; a really critical view on a very specific sort of gay identity. 

"It’s as if everything old is new again - everything changes and nothing changes at all."

GK: Another recent project I’d love to discuss is your book, I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine, published by Loose Joints in 2021. What did it mean to put that together? 

PS: Yes, the book’s another really important work for me. It feels like it’s closed a chapter on a decade of making work around loss and longing; like a culmination of a really important period of my creative output. In terms of my approach, a few years ago I started creating these installations of large framed works with adhesive vinyls behind them; these tableaux where something is revealed, but something’s also concealed from the viewer behind the frame. When Loose Joints approached me, I loved the idea of reinterpreting the experience of these installations into a photobook. Sadly, in the first year of the pandemic, an exhibition I had installed at Lightwork in Syracuse was shut down before it even opened! So I really wanted these installations to live somewhere, and the book was a means to take the way I put up work within an exhibition space and place it back into a publication. 

"We opted for an accordion format, which is something I’ve always been drawn to. It’s not sensible at all, but for me it was so absurd that it was perfect! I love how the accordion folds give a certain sense of repetition, but then there’s all these images hiding under one another as well."

GK: I’d also wanted to ask if there’s anything or anyone that particularly inspires you?

PS: I really admired my senior professor at the School of Visual Arts, the late Sarah Charlesworth. I think her way of finishing a photograph and her use of appropriation is incredibly elegant. I’m really drawn to elegant aesthetics when working with appropriation, because it can otherwise be something quite rough – and not at all seductive. 

"I also listen to a lot of Lana del Rey. I’m very serious about my Lana obsession! I must be in the top 0.002% of her Spotify listeners. But seriously, I sometimes think, if you want to understand my work, listen to some Lana del Rey!"

GK: I get it! I guess you both share an interest in those quintessentially American signifiers, or this archetypal American masculinity–

PS: Right!? When I say it, people realise it makes total sense! And I’m also a big lover of cinema, I read a bit of poetry – those are things that always give me inspiration. I think it’s important to look outside visual art, to be open to other creative forms.

GK: I’ve recently been reading a bit about queer aesthetics, and I was wondering if you have any thoughts on the idea? It can be a divisive topic; do you think such a thing exists?

PS: Divisive. Interesting! Yeah, I guess some people would be very much opposed to the idea! In my experience – and although I can’t quite verbalise it – I just know it when I see it. When you’re looking at a photograph or a painting, I feel as if those properties just reveal themselves. For instance, my aesthetics are very particular, and they read in a very specific way. But if I were to look at a contemporary figurative painter, even if my own work didn’t share much with that on the surface, I still feel like I can often gauge that we’re parked under the same umbrella! Queerness is almost the end of all meanings, right? It’s vast. So that’s how I feel in relation to queer aesthetics; it seems to be something that exists, but that’s not to say there’s a parallel set of rules, or that it implies a kind of aesthetic homogeneity.

GK: That’s an interesting take! Any other parting wisdoms?

PS: For me, the photograph is a living breathing document; it doesn’t stop today. When you take that photograph, you’ll be surprised by the infinite life it has and the ways in which it can be reinterpreted. That’s basically my guiding principle.