Nick Simko

Football

2015-2018

“Football” represents white able-bodied male formations as a way to visually articulate these intersections instead of privileging them as universal, transparent, and all-encompassing. Photographed during live game play and digitally rearticulated as painting-like portraits framed by floral forms, the resulting compositions echo the scale and style of monumental canvases and tapestries designed for the sixteenth-century palaces of the European ruling class. Computerized filters, on the other hand, approximate the nuanced texture of painted brushstrokes and the constructedness of each image. Ultimately, “Football” frames portraiture and representation as technologies that render human bodies as fluctuating surfaces upon which culture projects, incises, and embeds its ideals.