island is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Pacifico Silano titled, Psychosexual Thriller. This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and continues his exploration of print culture, image circulation and questions of LGBT+ identity.

Psychosexual Thriller dispenses with the notion of the archive as a neutral entity. Pacifico vests the works in the show with his own lived experiences as a teenager from working in his parents’ sex shop (called “Undercover Pleasures”) to losing his uncle to the AIDS crisis and his own experiences as a gay man. In “Turned On”, a veined hand presses against a mirror and creates a double, recalling Mary Harrow’s American Psycho where narcissistic rage lurks beneath a shiny facade. While in “Likeness”, the profiles of two faces are layered in sequence, so alike that they appear superimposed or copy and pasted. The image speaks of a culture of mimicry inherent to beauty and whiteness, invoking the question of what is desire built on top of. Both images echo Pacifico’s process, where the photograph can have many lives. Pacifico never scans his images, opting to re-photograph them in his studio before composing them into a tangible entity. The photographs live simultaneously as ephemera, digital files and objects as Pacifico ruminates on them.

For more than decade, Pacifico has been collecting gay pornographic magazines from the 70s and 80s (Torso, Honcho, Blueboy) and using them as the primary material for his practice. Imagery that was meant to be looked at and hidden away becomes indexical proof of an era that was at the intersection of the sexual revolution and the devastating HIV/AIDS crisis. This practice connects Pacifico to a legacy of queers archiving queer ephemera, helping transmit memories from one queer generation to the next. In “The Shadows”, masculine and cliche gay American iconography is evoked through close crops of men dressed as cowboys, construction workers or police officers. These men are surrogates for a visual culture built on performative selves, roles that we perform in our public and private lives. While “Gray Sweats” depicts the midriff in familiar and casual terms. The quotidian moment is an example of Pacifico’s sensitive approach to appropriation; the photograph becomes tactile and tender, bringing us closer to a moment that has already passed.

In “Body Heat”, a naked midriff speckled with sweat and printed larger than life on dye-sublimated aluminum emphasizes the object-ness of Pacifico’s practice. The body presses up against the present while refusing to fit tidily into any ideological framework. Only the complicated axis of desire between artist, viewer and imagined gay male remains, charging the surface of the work with emotion. Other sculptural works in the show include two entangled bodies compressed by a slab of plexiglass and a marine blue print on silk floating in the space. In the former, the bodies echo each other, veins strained and full of life while an eye, a witness, peeps through the shadows. The latter as a photograph is re-rendered into an object as Pacifico prints the image on an oversize length of fabric. A powerfully built half-torso’s rippling muscles parallels the ridges of the fabric next to it. All this transmutation blurs the boundaries between body, photograph and object as the original image gets blown up into something more potent, a pure image that brings back something forgotten into the here and now.

Silano’s works have been exhibited in both group and solo shows at the likes of the Bronx Museum; Tacoma Art Museum; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; The Museum of Sex; The International Center for Photography, Houston Center for Photography; Baxter ST@CCNY; Rubber-Factory; Stellar Projects; Light Work; Melanie Flood Projects; Fragment Gallery & Luis De Jesus Gallery. His work is also found in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Silano is a past recipient of the Aaron Siskin Foundation Fellowship, the NYFA Fellowship in Photography, and a finalist of the 2013 Aperture Foundation Portfolio Prize. He was shortlisted for the Paris Photo/Aperture First Book Award with his debut publication, I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine, published by Loose Joints in 2021.

Pacifico Silano (b. 1986, USA) is a lens-based appropriation artist based in New York City, where he graduated with an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2012. Exploring print culture, image circulation and questions of LGBT+ identity, his work is entirely composed of repurposed fragments from gay pornographic magazines of the 1970s and 80s – an era connecting the progressive legacies of sexual revolution with the advent of the devastating HIV/AIDS crisis. Silano’s works have been exhibited in both group and solo shows at the likes of the Bronx Museum; Tacoma Art Museum; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; The Museum of Sex; The International Center for Photography, Houston Center for Photography; Baxter ST@CCNY; Rubber-Factory; Stellar Projects; Light Work; Melanie Flood Projects; Fragment Gallery & Luis De Jesus Gallery. His work is also found in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Silano is a past recipient of the Aaron Siskin Foundation Fellowship, the NYFA Fellowship in Photography, and a finalist of the 2013 Aperture Foundation Portfolio Prize. He was shortlisted for the Paris Photo/Aperture First Book Award with his debut publication, I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine, published by Loose Joints in 2021.

CV    

solo exhibitions

Pacifico Silano, Psychosexual Thriller
04.04 – 05.18.2024

Pacifico Silano, If You Gotta Hurt Sombody, Please Hurt Me
04.1 – 05.8.2022

Pacifico Silano, Time Is An Ocean But It Ends At The Shore
10.16 – 12.15. 2019

Pacifico Silano, John John
09.30 – 11.15.2017



group exhibitions

White Lodge
05.19 – 07.01.2023

circular ruins
09.30 – 10.30.2022

readings

2024 | Musée Magazine
2024 | Widewalls
2023 | I-D Magazine 
2022 | New Yorker
2022 | Artsy
2022 | Musée Magazine
2022 | Collector Daily
2021 | ARTnews

works

available on Artsy here
inquire here