VIRTUAL SENIOR SHOW: Noah Fox
My body of work is broken into a few difference segments, each representing a different interest and artistic endeavor. My greatest passions in life are cooking and art, and in the past several years I have picked up a fascination with food photography and the documentation of temporary works. Though it is not my only artistic trade, I felt it was important to include at least a few highlights from my body of work in this show because of the unconventional intersection it presents. Yes it is a form of photography, but the dish itself is somewhat of an edible sculpture. Elements present in every artistic field like color, balance, rhythm, and texture play an important role in not just documentation of the original work itself but how the photo will be perceived long after the piece is gone. My other major interest that can be seen scattered through the works of this show is queerness and the male body. As a gay man and an artist I sit in a difficult position, because I am surrounded by images in the media telling me all the ways my own body could be made better, yet I have gained such an appreciation for men’s bodies as a work of art, each beautiful in their own way. By integrating the bodies I find perfect and expressing my own struggles with mental health through images of my body, I hope to provoke questions about beauty standards, especially in the queer community, and beg viewers to think deeply about their own idea of perfection, love, and beauty. By addressing the HIV/AIDs pandemic and my own lived experience with COVID-19, I feel as if im drawing connections between the queer figures who lead the way for life as I know it and the struggles of people today, which may look different, but ultimately boil down to the same pain. Finally, my last major theme is abstraction and color. My favorite exploration in my time as a student has been the psychology of color, as I am doubling in both art and psych. Many of my abstract works don’t directly represent a tangible subject, instead allowing the color to become the emotional experience of the work instead. This body of work has been selected because of the breadth of subjects and media it spans, covered many of my favorite artistic bases in the process.
Title: “Sushi Rolls"
Medium: Photography
Year: 2021
Description: My two greatest passions in life are art and cooking, and my food photography merges those two. By using the same principles and elements that make art beautiful, I capture an edible sculpture of sorts in a time frozen moment, incorporating color, rhythm, and contrast into the documentation, so it acts are more than a representation of the roll, but a piece of art in and of itself, after it’s subject is gone.
Title: “Ezra’s Birthday Cake"
Medium: Photography
Year: 2021
Description: I view most of what I cook as sculpture to be photographed. Birthday cakes in particular hold a lot of significance for me as a creator, because I have always opted for homemade gifts for those I love. While im always at a loss on what to get people, I know I can always bake them something beautiful to show my love to them, when I don’t know how else to say it. This photograph isn’t just cake. It is the time and dedication that goes into a gift, even when the giver doesn’t quite know how to show his love, instead, reaching out though acts of service instead of the material.
Title: “Bruschetta on Toast"
Medium: Photography
Year: 2022
Description: Though simple, I find that one of the most challenging parts of food photography are the background and capturing the right details. This toast sits on a clean white background, highlighting the brightness of the reds and the warm undertones of the crust. While I generally avoid placing the subject in the center of most of my non food works, breaking those rules and allowing the sculpture exist alone in space for documentation helps highlight the subject, isolating it from reality and it’s surroundings as it might be found on a menu or in a book.
Title: “Slow Down, You Move Too Fast”
Medium: Photography
Year: 2022
Description: This photo explores the rainbow, from purple and pink, yellow and green, ascending up into blues. I used my partner as my model to capture the fleeting nostalgia of a perfect moment, like a rainbow in the sky. If you don’t stop to take it in, it leaves without you ever knowing, but it’s that fear of missing out that makes me miss the moments that have already passed most. We rarely know a perfect moment when were in one. It usually dawns on us later, as we recollect the event an yearn to go back.
Title: “A Tribute to SOPHIE"
Medium: Colored Pencil on Paper
Year: 2021
Description: When I first heard of the singer SOPHIE’s untimely death on the morning of January 31th, I didn’t believe it was real. I thought it was part of an elaborate new project. As a queer artist, her death hit me hard. That day, I reimagined the “It’s Okay to Cry” album cover work, as an eerie but beautiful memorial. The creative process was almost therapeutic to me, because I’m not only grieving the artist, but mourning her artwork that will never be created again. As a pioneer in the hyper-pop scene, she essentially invented a genre that wouldn't get huge until after her death, but will never be the same because she’s no longer there to influence and add to it.
Title: “Love Letter to Male Beauty"
Medium: Charcoal on Paper
Year: 2017
Description: I consider this my first work that I genuinely felt proud of. Though simple, the male form remains my favorite subject to draw even years later. While this model may not have the body of the Riace warrior, I find perfection in the parts that humanize him. The contrast between the softness of the figures stomach yet sharpness in his upper chest, and even the asymmetrical shadows give him life. I have always been drawn to the male form, and this piece is the jumping off point for focus.
Title: “SugarTank”
Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Year: 2021
Description: This pop art inspired self portrait pays homage to decades of queer art and love. Inspired by a photo taken of my partner and I at a drag ball in Los Angeles the summer we met, I play with bright flashy colors and sparks, celebrating the artists, creators, drag queens, and activists who came before us, making it safe to freely be ourselves today.
Title: “Suffocation”
Medium: Photography
Year: 2021
Description: There is no way to shield yourself from media influences telling you your body is all wrong. I’ve struggled my whole life to love the body I have. When you’re constantly surrounded by visual culture making you nit pick and question even the parts of yourself that you thought you loved the week before, it feels all consuming, like an inescapable darkness clawing up you neck. This photo was taken just over a year ago, at a very transformative point in my life. Despite initial satisfaction, when I look back, so unhappy with the curves of my body. I see nothing but flaws when I compare it to the progress I’ve made and where I am now because I am so saturated with the idea of perfection and comparison. It is hard to resist the urge to reshoot this with my current body, but if I did, I would be giving into the darkness, telling me ill never be perfect. To do so would be dishonest with the work’s intent so instead I sit at the edge of discomfort, trying to embrace it.
Title: “Self Portrait"
Medium: Charcoal and Chalk on Paper
Year: 2017
Description: Continuing my exploration of the male form, in piece 6, I use my own body, the parts I am most proud of, being my upper back and shoulders, to explore the balance of androgyny. My own masculine body is contrasted by the feminine, almost modest pose. I spent my adolescence hiding away the parts of myself that didn’t fit in. I grew a thick skin and stayed strong, but it wasn’t until I learned that I can be a better man by embracing both the feminine and the masculine in myself, that I felt like I truly belonged in my own skin.
Title: “Chromatic Reflection”
Medium: Photography
Year: 2021
Description: Bright streaks of light and color against a dark background beg the viewer to ask how this photo was taken. To me, the process is the art itself. By holding a screen flashing multiple colors quickly over a dark bathtub while kicking the water to disturb the surface, the long exposure captures a reality that never existed. A camera can only take a picture of something that is real, but this form, in the state we see it in, was never there and was never made by man. I find photos of the impossible really hard to create well but so rewarding because the result can’t be recreated in any other medium.
Title: “Negative Space Self Portrait"
Medium: Wood and Acrylic
Year: 2022
Description: In one of my first major ventures into sculpture, I wanted to find a way to utilize space in a way that leaves the creators mark on the work, without being too forward or needed an explanation, which I’ve struggled with in past sculptures. My solution was a set of three pillars, which when viewed from the right angle, reveal a self portrait, a common theme within my body of work, but explored into a new dimension and in a new medium.
Title: “Shrine to the Preventables”
Medium: Mixed Media and found objects
Year: 2022
Description: This four demential kinetic sculpture is made of PPE against the two major pandemics that have effected my life, HIV/AIDS and Covid-19. While I think pandemic art is cliche, I was so moved by John Boskovich’s “Feel it Motherfuckers”, that I wanted to respond to it in some way. Part of the reason both HIV and Covid were so infectious initially was because no one understood how either was transmitted at first. People thought you could get HIV by simply talking to or brushing arms with someone with the virus, while the government first said that masks could lead to higher risk of Covid transmission because you might be tempted to touch your face more. Because of early misinformation, fear mongering, and systematic denial, instead of research millions of people lost their lives in ways that could have otherwise been preventable. By suspending gloves, condoms, and facemarks in the air then blowing on them, I am breathing life into a message that can’t be heard, but the air of their voice is still felt. If I had to put words to the piece, the voice would be screaming to use protection, wear masks, and listen to what scientists say. Take precaution and don’t let something preventable claim your life. Every life that was lost before the person knew how to protect themselves is screaming to the people of the future to learn from the past, but those in the moment can’t hear until it is already too late
Title: “Bloom”
Medium: Acrylic on Wood
Year: 2022
Description: It is hard to describe a painting that represents nothing. Though visual elements bare resemblance to flowers, rocks, caves, or rain, it is truly just an exploration of themes across pop music and art pop, touching on colors, shapes, and patters that are seen in cover art or imagined when listening to music.
Title: “Waiting”
Medium: Acrylic on Wood
Year: 2022
Description: I ran out of gesso to prep this board, so I tried spray painting it white. As soon as the first layer of acrylic touched the spray paint directly it beaded up, creating an accidental but really intricate form, reminiscent of an old man on a park bench in space.The background pays homage to my early misinterpretations of a Piet Mondrian work I saw in elementary school and assumed was a map of a city, not a real painting. My waiting figure sits on top his city map, shielded in a swoosh of pink, from the night’s sky around him.
Title: “The Kraken”
Medium: Acrylic on Wood
Year: 2022
Description: When I think of this painting, two meanings come to mind. Yes it is a sea monster, with swirling tentacles and a dark mouth to engulf the viewer, but it is also an anus. As dueterostomes, there is a point in all our existences where all we are is an anus. I think of the theorized origins of life, in a warm shallow puddle somewhere on earth with just the right pH and molecules to begin something completely new, by chance alone. I consider this to be one of my strongest works because it feels like two paintings put onto one board, yet no layer of the work could exist on its one.