WES HEMPEL
Artist Statement
A walk through any major museum will reveal paintings that depict or
legitimate only certain kinds of experience. Despite the good intentions
of critical theorists questioning the validity of the canon, paintings
of the old masters on the walls of museums like the Met, the Louvre,
Rijks museum still have a certain cache. They're revered not just for
their technique but because they enshrine our collective past
experience. Of course, it's a selected past that gets validated.
Conspicuously absent to me as a gay man is my own story. By presenting
contemporary males as objects of desire in familiar looking art
historical settings, I'm able to imagine (and allow viewers to imagine) a
past that includes rather than excludes gay experience-and ride the
coattails, as it were, of art history's imprimatur.
