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Brad
Guarino
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a garbage man when I grew up, because garbage men were strong, drove a big truck, and did something that was useful. It was an occupation that was important to society—something decent, clear, and practical. And it seemed very manly. As a young boy, the idea that I would someday grow up to be manly was an important source of self-assurance. Boys look around them to find male role models and then try to assemble from these various sources a masculine ideal that they hope to live up to. They imitate behaviors and attitudes that conform to this ideal and suppress those that do not. Long before they are of age, they begin to “act” like men. This act continues to evolve but never ends, even long after the boy has become a man.
In my artwork, I contrive fictional worlds populated exclusively by men. The figures in my compositions are drawn from photo-based collages made by recombining parts from various images of men. The collage process refers the constructed nature of gender and how boys form their concept of male roles, i.e. by piecing together the perceived characteristics of cultural icons and stereotypes with those of influential men in their lives.
I grew up in a family of abstractionists, but I was always drawn to the magic of illusionistic representational painting. From the picture books of my childhood to my first visits to a museum as an adolescent, I have loved images that told stories. The visual narratives that most captivated me were those that created some sense of mystery; an odd relationship, pose, or gesture creating an enigma that stayed with me long after I left the image behind. In my art, I work intuitively—looking for relationships that allude to something truthful. I try to develop narratives in which an idea is present, but just a little out of my reach. The process always leaves me feeling that I did not quite say everything I wanted to say and leads me to making the next work.
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