Secret Gay Box
John Wolf Fine Art’s exhibition for the Spring/Break Art Show 2018, whose theme, Stranger Comes to Town, was an artistic examination of those who are seemingly or actually different from the world around them.
Like Tracey Emin’s My Bed, Secret Gay Box encapsulates a moment in the life of an individual. Instead of a single object or work, it uses a variety of works in different media from different times to create the ethos of adolescent formation, a time characterized by flux and uncertainty. It is a comment on the construction of identity through collected, foraged, sometimes fiercely protected influences.
This is how the show’s curator, John Wolf, describes his childhood: “Growing up in an Evangelical Christian home, being gay was a sin and a flaw, something only Jesus could change. So as a child, the ability to read and explore my nascent sexuality was not only fearful but had to be hidden, in a secret gay box.” The exhibition revives that box in a way that is personal and visceral for Wolf and for the viewer. It tells the story of what it is like to find out very early in life that you are a stranger in your own community. “Said box contained ephemera from magazines, books, etc.,” Wolf continues. “The secrecy of my identity also led to my love of art and collecting. As a child I hoarded artifacts, rocks, bottle caps, antique bottles, the idea of filling my personal space with objects that could distract from the fearful reality that was my existence. For this project, I am bringing the secret gay box and its contents to life, a stranger in our evangelical home.”
The idea of the box as exhibition space contrasts playfully with the more traditional, more sterile cube of the gallery. Wolf is known for his self-aware use of unconventional space: he has given legendary work by artists like Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe new meaning by placing it in unusual contexts, as in Human Condition, which took place in an abandoned hospital in Los Angeles. Like Wolf’s childhood box, this space is one where art hides in plain sight, where people don’t think to look. The works embody queerness in its most subtle and most overt forms: deeply personal images of forbidden sexualities, in Polaroids or photo-booth pictures; vintage and even ancient images that prove queerness has been around as long as humanity; objects that speak to a very personal and unconventional aesthetic sense.
The works have what Eve Sedgwick called “texxture,” the kind of texture that is dense with offered information about how, substantially, historically, materially, it came into being. The texxture of each object communicates its origin, its place in queer history, its emotional significance; the show as a whole tells its own highly individual and intimate origin as a collection of secret gay items.
It is a time capsule and it is also a time machine.
This Secret Gay Box is the collision point for a variety of contradictory impulses: stranger and family member, individual and collective, a single moment in the history of a single boy’s sexuality and the expansive history of queerness embodied in a menagerie of objects from across time. Enter the world of the secret gay box, and find the stranger that lives within.
