(de)constructed Artist Spotlight: Caleb Cole
(de)constructed:
CALEB COLE
In the back gallery hangs a series of colorful collage works by featured artist Caleb Cole. Cole removes the subjects from vintage magazine spreads, filling the original forms with cut scraps from the background imagery.
The photographs in Traces began as pictorials in gay men’s magazines from the 1980s and 1990s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Men’s bodies exposed, on display, are then excised and replaced by hand with pieces of other images in the sequence. Tracing the edges of their bodies with a blade is both tender and violent, and the resulting images leave marks of absence that weigh heavy with loss. The work explores what it means to be seen, to be vulnerable, and speaks to access and interest in queer and trans bodies, gendered notions of desire, and the pieces of ourselves that we hide from view.
Caleb Cole is a Midwest-born, Boston-based artist whose work addresses the opportunities and difficulties of queer belonging, as well as aims to be a link in the creation of that tradition, no matter how fragile or ephemeral or impossible its connections.
(de)constructed will be on view at Candela Gallery through February 19, 2022.