Pacifico Silano

BRIC’s spring Gallery exhibition, When I Am Empty Please Dispose of Me Properly, showcases seven artists whose work delves into the intertwined nature of desire and sadness. Through their pieces, Ayanna Dozier, Ilana Harris-Babou, Meena Hasan, Lucia Hierro, Catherine Opie, Chuck Ramirez, and Pacifico Silano explore the myths of the American Dream that shape and govern our personal narratives.

Dozens of art lovers braved the rain Wednesday to catch the opening night of two exciting new contemporary art exhibitions at BRIC: One exploring myths of the "American dream" and the other a deeply personal film and collection of drawings based on old photographs.

The historic arts organization BRIC opened its latest exhibit on Wednesday, bringing a packed crowd to their latest display that explores the mythos of the American dream via individual experience. “When I am Empty Please Dispose of Me Properly” features the work of seven artists (Ayanna Dozier, Ilana Harris-Babou, Meena Hasan, Lucia Hierro, Catherine Opie, Chuck Ramirez and Pacifico Silano) at the BRIC House in Fort Greene, and will be on display until April 30.

Inspired by a polaroid of his late uncle, Frank, Pacifico Silano began collating imagery of queer men from an era of liberation and tragedy.  As Pacifico came of age, art became a space to ask questions both sacred and profane, and to look for answers where once there had only been questions. 

Recognising the power of archival images to bridge generations and explore longstanding archetypes of gender and sexuality, Pacifico explored the connections between past and present in new and revelatory ways. 

Pacifico Silano is known for sourcing archival images of gay pornography, mostly from the 1970s and 1980s, to interrogate white masculinity and American clichés through the lens of queer desire. He creates his work by photographing, rather than scanning, the archival photographs he has collected. Silano often layers them physically on top of each other, sometimes repeating the process with several magazines, and then takes a picture of the final layout. He makes further edits to those images by cropping or scaling them to show the pixelated grain, paper fibers, rough edges, or a detail of the magazine spine.
 

This is what we see: sweat, desert, automobiles, men’s fashion, men’s bodies, and blue jeans. But this is not what Pacifico Silano wants us to notice in his solo exhibit If You Gotta Hurt Somebody, Please Hurt Me. Instead, the reconstructed photographs from the 1970s and 80s become an iconic part of what Silano is turning a critical gaze towards: toxic masculinity and its intersection with white queer desire.

Sex is everywhere and nowhere in the photographic work of Pacifico Silano. Take, for example, Violent Delights (2022), a black-and-white image of a shirtless man with shaggy hair who tightly clasps a rifle with one hand, while the other grabs something, or someone, below, just beyond the frame. This image, with its allusion to sex and thinly veiled parallel between the phallus and physical violence, is a key work in the artist’s new, two-part show in New York.

By expanding these little details, Silano also makes the viewer focus on the materiality of the pages. In the larger works, the dot matrices become visible, and the dog-eared folds look less crisp. Sometimes, if he has duplicates that have aged differently — whether by oxidisation or literal wear-and-tear — he places the same page next to itself. He tries not to change the pages themselves any more, as he did when he was a student. The turning point came after he worked in New York University’s Fales Library, where he was forced to make his collages without a blade. “There’s a sensitive gesture of gently laying something on top of another,” Silano said.

Pacifico Silano describes himself as a ‘lens-based artist,’ not as a photographer. While this may seem like a somewhat superfluous label, it has its merits. As he has pointed out, Silano does not take any of the photographs that he publishes — rather, his artistic practice is rooted in cutting, collaging, layering, and arranging various images from printed media. What results is far from a mere reiteration of these photographic ephemera; instead, we are presented with a wholly original exposition of the themes contained in these pictures.

Pacifico Silano uses photographs from vintage gay pornography magazines to make colorful collages that explore print culture and the histories of the LGBTQ+ community. His works are generally large scale, evoking strength and sexuality along with the underlying repression and trauma that many marginalized individuals experience. 

Absent are bodies in Pacifico Silano’s After Silence, yet this absence leaves a haunting presence in what remains. The artist, who only photographed magazines he personally culled over the years, was given access to former Whitney curator Richard Marshall’s collection of gay pornography, donated to NYU Fales Library following Marshall’s passing in 2014. From leather daddies to Americana and foaming beaches, all that is dear to queer life permeates from the pages, not excluding euphoria, endurance, and death.