He was raised in Longmont, Colo., a conservative community outside of liberal Boulder. It also makes me think of the color I see through my eyelids when I close my eyes.”īarker links his interest in exploring intimacy in his art to his childhood. “The soft shade of the material just feels sweet and visceral.
The color pink was a symbol of survival during the 1980s AIDS crisis,” Barker says, referencing the “Silence=Death” logo adopted by ACT UP, which depicts the pink triangle used by Nazis to identify homosexuals in concentration camps. “I work with ground marble dust, which is, technically, a pastel.
HYPER REALISTIC GAY SEX ART SERIES
The pink backgrounds in Barker’s “Glorious” series also have a backstory. “I now get great joy out of using this knowledge to draw closeness, love, and, perhaps, the occasional hyper-realistic penis.” “I take great pride in using the French l’école drawing techniques to portray human experiences that had been previously demonized,” he says. I wanted to decontextualize this pairing of queer touch with brutality and show the intimacy in these images as simply human,” he says.īarker honed his intricate, hyper-realistic style during an intensive three-month drawing program at Old Hollows Atelier in the Colorado Rockies, where he studied the Old Master drawings of Charles Bargue.
“I came to realize that every photo I came across on the internet was some news story reporting on a hate crime or some sort of brutality because a couple was holding hands. “Public display of affection as queer people comes with some danger,” he says. The work of artist Cameron Barker is on view at Room 68 in Provincetown. Instead of drawing live models, Barker worked in this series from stock images used in advertisements for HIV medication and photographs of queer brutalization on the internet. I think that is why I love Provincetown so much, because I am able to hold the person’s hand that I love and lean up against them and not feel in danger.” “ ‘Closeness’ and ‘intimacy’ are buzzwords that get thrown about, but, for me, the concept is very serious. “My intention in this work is to show the history of forced secretness and, at the same time, circumvent it by demonstrating the unifying aspects of a loving connection,” Barker says. After the HIV epidemic obliterated many of the rules and conventions of queer sex, glory holes largely disappeared, yet they remain a theme in gay pornography and fantasy.īarker’s drawings challenge the sleazy connotations, both past and present, of glory hole sex and voyeurism by depicting glimpses of exquisitely tender erotic moments: the longing of open lips, fingers playfully interlacing, a light kiss on a forehead, faces touching. The 11 pieces in the series reference “glory holes” - openings cut into public bathroom walls or slits between cubicles where anonymous sexual encounters would happen between men because such relations were forbidden or suppressed. “Cameron’s ‘Glorious’ series exemplifies the talent, cohesive ideas, and skill of his studio practice.” “Each year, I try to include a few recent graduates studying art or design in the New England area,” says owner Brent Refsland. His “Glorious” series, a collection of hyper-realistic drawings celebrating queer intimacy, is on view through New Year’s. graduate and postgraduate fellow at Tufts University, Barker is one of 12 artists introduced this year by Room 68, an art and design gallery at 377 Commercial St. “Because of the need many people feel to reject certain kinds of loving, consenting touch comes from a place of fear.”Ī 2020 M.F.A. “There are far more similarities to human touch than there are differences, regardless of who you love,” says artist Cameron Barker. Aperture is a 16-by-16-inch graphite drawing with marble dust solution on panel.