This morning's six digital collages are a full body workout. Each one works a different part of the practice: the subject, the scale, the history and the palette. There's only one way to get visually buff, and that's to produce. The work improves by being made, and these are today's morning reps:
The subject stays the same throughout: men together.
In What They're Thinking, two men in overcoats walk a cliff path while a couple in suits kisses above them. The scale and space both affirm and supersede a natural representation to a supernatural one.
In What They Tell Their Families, two men share a bed under the caption "We're just friends." The first two titles work as a pair, one for the private thought and one for the public account. "We're just friends" is the phrase that has covered for men together for generations. Here it sits over an image that contradicts it, and the subtext becomes the context.
In Midnight Moon, a man emerges from a pool at night, revealing his prodigious party gift to the delight of his Scruff hook ups.
In Haring Elegy, two men embrace in a room covered in drawings by Keith Haring, titled Once Upon a Time, which he painted in May 1989 in the men's room of the LGBT Community Center in New York, less than a year before he died of AIDS-related complications.
In History Looking Back, History Looking Forward, an enlarged torso and a pair of blue sweatpants become the ground, and 1950s physique models stand at the height of a waistband.
In Feeling Connor McGuire, enlarged skin becomes an orange landscape behind a model in white briefs. The body is the figure and also the setting.
History runs through the set. Physique photography of the 1950s circulated among gay men as fitness imagery at a time when anything more open could lead to arrest. Those models now share the frame with a man from today's feed.
The palette holds the set together. Blue repeats in the moon, the sweatpants, the sheets and the pool. Against it are warm skin tones and a field of orange. The cliffs are pushed to lavender and green, and the night pool to green and violet. The color moves from piece to piece, but the blue stays constant.
Tomorrow brings another set of reps.