James Unsworth:
Girth and Mirth
RawArt Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel
November 30, 2017 - January 06, 2018
Unswort was born in 1979 in Liverpool. His works are characterized by direct, hyperbolic, and intense depictions of corporeal scenes combined with elements culled from popular visual culture. These elements are mostly connected to consumerism and capitalism, body, sexuality, and death, as well as subcultures such as comics, cartoons, junk food, and pornography.
In his exhibition "Girth and Mirth" (a witticism describing a gay subculture of large men, referencing a group/club by the same name, initiated in the 1970s), Unsworth presented two new series of works. One was a series of collages based on photographs taken from erotic gay magazines for heavy men, onto the surface of which the artist had applied fruit and flower imagery. The images were large, enticing, and colorful, and they referenced pejorative terms used toward gay men ("fruit," "pansy"), ascribing to them feminine characteristics as derisible features.
Like previous works by Unsworth, those displayed in the exhibition pointed their arrows at the contemporary economy of restraints, which draws clear and oppressive boundaries in regard to both sex and body size. Both these arenas, which society holds as criteria for self-control, are already challenged by the images Unsworth has used as the ground for his works (erotic and pornographic images from niche magazines). But the artist added to that by exaggerating, elaborating, and expanding the images in a way that granted them an enlarged presence, turning the tables and debunking conventional judgments. It is important to note Unsworth's complex mode of operation, which leaves no stone unturned in regard to the oppressive nature of the visual regimes enveloping us while offering a new, festive, and liberated possibility that was full of life.
