Intricate Rituals - Carmelo Amenta

Growing up in a post-Reagan Era conservative Catholic household, sexuality was never discussed. Watching Westerns with my father I slowly came to realize that I did not want to be a cowboy. I wanted to fuck the cowboy. This work, Intricate Rituals, explores how representations of the male figure are formed and abstracted by the queer gaze to express desire, tension, violence and the longing of intimacy. Using the cowboy as a conduit of American masculinity by conflating these ideas with appropriated photographs from gay pornographic magazines and typewritten text.

The magazines date from the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic to the year I was born, 1995. This addresses the ripple effect the epidemic had to the queer generation born directly after it started. I respect the histories in which these photographs initially existed by keeping the ephemera intact; staples, dog ears, binding of the pages. At the same time I formulate a new narrative by abstracting and fragmenting the figures. I bring my perspective into this work by incorporating text from my own experiences before I came out of the closet and the years after.

The abstracted bodies in the photographs turn into visions of landscapes of the open range in which the cowboy roamed. This perception becomes a direct contrast to the privacy and confinement of the closet. The closet and the expansive landscape are contradictory settings, and yet they share feelings of loneliness and isolation. The work is an amalgamation of images that have traveled through time, molded by my own perspective, allowing access to the intricate rituals of navigating queerness.