Nick Simko

Football (2018)

Using lens-based photography and digital imaging, Football is an exercise in representing normative white able-bodied cisgender male formations in the terms of race, gender, embodiment, and orientation. I wanted to see what it might look like if I made a body of work that visually corporealized these intersections instead of privileging them as universal, transparent, and all-encompassing. Visually isolated away from the din of the football field, the subjects of these images echo the scale and style of monumental portraits and tapestries, specifically by citing works designed for the sixteenth-century palaces of the white European ruling class. Computerized filters, on the other hand, virtually approximate the nuanced texture of painted brushstrokes. Ultimately, Football frames portraiture as a process that renders human bodies as fluctuating surfaces upon which culture projects, incises, and embeds its ideals.