Avram Finkelstein, “Every Little Move” PRIDE X
Gay Pride Festival, June 2011, New York, pp. 88-94
Excerpt:
…Eloquence is a lot to expect of a single photograph, but eloquent is the only way to describe Ken Gonzales-Day’s work. His recent suite, Profiled, says more about the history of art, the construction of race, the xq of exclusion, and the meaning of desire than any treatise, and Gonzales-Day achieves it with the simplest of rhetorical devices, juxtaposition. His Erased Lynching series removes the victims and the ropes from archival photos of hanging trees, shifting the focus to the terrible reality of the crowd below. Hang Trees reminds us that Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Latinos were also caught up in the dark web of the American soul. And if you think Gonzales-Day has nothing to offer on the question of heterocentrism, witness his deft assemblage of late-19th- and early- 20th-century photos of same-sex couples, cowboys, cross-dressers, and classical statuary depicting satyrs and hermaphrodites. Ken Gonzales-Day has shown at UC San Diego’s University Art Gallery; Palais de Tokyo in Paris; Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles; and White Columns in New York. An extension of his Profiled was recently featured at Las Cienegas Projects in L.A. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will be publishing Gonzales-Day’s monograph, Profiled, in June. His Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 just went into its second printing and is available through the artist’s website, www.kengonzalesday.com, and on Kindle.
Source: Pride X