David Handforth

     I am an artist working across photography, collage, and performance exploring queer futurism, behavioralism, and American symbols. Queerness has yet to breach the minds of the public, and as a result they replicate the oppressive practices implicit to society. These choreographed movements have to be met with an effort to destabilize conformity. 
    By investigating the figures of queer men, I seek to provide a visual guide to these disturbances. I work to create a demonology of the archetypes I have encountered both in person and throughout history, such as the broken horse and the weeping scope. I am less interested in identity as a stable category, instead in how bodies are produced through repetition, coercion, spectacle, and survival.    
     The work often calls for use of the oppressor’s tactics, because of how they impact my body. Through this my body becomes an instrument that develops social forces, like photographic paper develops light. My practice is an investigation, questioning which identities became dead ends, which performances became traps, and which survival strategies harden into prisons.