ABOUT
James Behan is a dual citizen with Ireland and USA currently residing and working in Dallas, Texas.
Artist STATEMENT
James Behan is a digital photocollage artist and multimedia maker based in Dallas, Texas.
His primary body of work, The Closet Series, documents queer identity, gay male visibility, and the lives of men who lived in shadow during the mid-to-late twentieth century and continue to do so today.
Behan’s photocollages combine vintage photography with contemporary imagery primarily sourced through social media’s ever evolving depiction of the male figure. In creating the collage, Behan uses mismatched resolutions, rough edges, and visible seams as both method and metaphor. The artificiality is intentional. The archive is ongoing.
His multimedia work includes painting, relief sculpture, and installation, centering on The Bathers and Saints Series — works that merge the separate traditions of saints and bathers as the art historical covers for the gay male nude.
When a digital collage moves off the screen and onto canvas, the paradigm shifts. The printed image becomes a ground — a surface to be worked, marked, layered. Paint, ink, watercolor, decals, and found objects enter the conversation. Here the two practices of digital collage and multi media works converge, and what emerges is neither digital work nor multimedia object but something that couldn’t have existed without both — the past and the present of the work made whole in a single piece.
Behan holds an MFA in painting and is a dual citizen of Ireland and the United States.
The Closet Series represents his most sustained and ambitious project to date. The Jupiter 3 was never lost in space.
For availability and pricing please email jbehan06(at)gmail.com.