Nick Simko

My work uses photography to examine the interwoven cultural technologies of portraiture and representation, their complex histories, and their impact on how we both perceive and author ourselves and our images. 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.

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 white European ruling class. Computerized filters, on the other hand, virtually approximate the nuanced texture of painted brushstrokes. Ultimately, “Football” frames portraiture and representation as technologies that render human bodies as fluctuating surfaces upon which culture projects, incises, and embeds its ideals.