DIFFUSION: LOOKING FOR AMERICA
TOWARDS AMERICA – HOME SWEET HOME
One of the most thought-provoking and imaginative exhibits from this Diffusion show was by photographic artist John Paul Evans. Welsh born Evans, who’s been an artist and photographer for 26 years, graduated with a BA hons degree in Fine Art from Gwent College of Higher Education and a MPhil from Swansea Metropolitan University. He was a lecturer at the University of Wales in Cardiff for 10 years and has been a Senior Lecturer in Photography for the University, Trinity Saint David at Swansea for over 15 years.
Along with having his art and photos in various publications and exhibited solo and in group shows in the UK and internationally, his work was selected in 2014 as a competition winner in the Photo Review Awards (Philadelphia) and as a third prize winner in the Open category for the Pride Photo Awards (Amsterdam). This year, Evans has been selected as a Hasselblad Masters of Photography Finalist and also to represent the five years of the Pride Photo Awards.
Evans’ work stems from an interest in gender and explores the polemics of representing the male figure within a patriarchal context and has included subjects such as gay marriage and wedding portraits, the home (along with land ownership and being outsiders), toy action figures, Oscar Wilde and Dorian Gray. He’s even recreated scenes of classic western art using himself and partner, Peter. Evans isn’t afraid to break boundaries, frequently featuring himself in nude portraits. He’s come a long way since one of his first shows at Chapter!
He participated in the first Diffusion festival and is back in this show that looks on notions of home and where we live, who we are, how we connect with others, belonging and our place in the world. Can you go back home? Is home anywhere you make it or a state of mind? He uses the song Home Sweet Home, opera singer Adelina Patti, Oscar Wilde, and himself and Peter in the photos. The two men are observers and at the same time, the focus, as they’re inserted in photos inside photos, for example. The work is heavy with symbolism, flowers being one example, and is humorous and serious at the same time. Evans was kind enough to answer some questions for BUZZ:
I’ve read that one reason you usually photograph yourself and your partner Peter is because is because you’re worried about objectifying strangers. Why is that?}
I originally used self-portraiture in part for concerns about objectifying others, especially in relation to representations of the body. For instance, the stilled lives body of work was a response to the way notions of gender are reinforced through particular poses. But of course, as soon as this decision is made, there is an element of self-reflection and autobiography. As the work has progressed, especially in recent years, with the works that include Peter, I realise that there is an urgency in my own mind to leave a trace of a relationship. From an academic point of view I was critical of the way that photography is used to reinforce concepts of the family and normality. As a consequence, I have very few images of the 26 years that Peter and I have spent together. As I am now entering my 50s and Peter is in his late 70s, there was an urgency to address this in my own mind and create alternatives to the couple/wedding/family portrait. I am aware that because of our different ages, some people might interpret the works in different ways – for instance father and son – but that is the reality of my lived experience, and on one level I see these works as a personal memoir. So long as people understand the images in a tragi-comic series of images of figures in different points in their personal chronology, who can never grow old together, exploring ideas of space and place and time, then they are in the intended territory. Roland Barthes talked about our desire to record our loved ones through the photographic image when in fact the image only represents their passing in time as we can never regain the moment frozen for the camera. Therefore, he argues, the camera can only record death. I don’t mean this to sound as dark as it seems on the surface, which is one reason for employing playfulness and comedy, so that the images might seem more playfully melancholic rather than straightforward tragedy. The resulting images I see as performances for the camera that respond to various themes and ideas from contemporary western art history. Marital Ties were a series of images that were influenced by the political debate over gay marriage and took the wedding portrait as a starting point to explore various poses and absurd permutations of the wedding portrait.
Where did the idea for using the song come from? Did the fact that Patti was associated with it and also with Wilde just follow naturally?
Home Sweet Home was a development of these earlier works. I was investigating the pervasive phrases that reinforce the family and the home in popular culture and was thinking about David Drake’s (Diffusion director) idea of looking for America. When I realised that the generic term home sweet home originated in a ballad written by John Howard Payne and was adopted as an American Civil war propaganda, this seemed to be a good starting point for an idea. I then found that the song became synonymous with Patti who had famously sung the song for Abraham Lincoln at the President’s request to console him after the loss of his son Willie to typhoid. Patti spent her latter years in the Swansea valley, and this then seemed to be a good proposal through degrees of separation for a group show of people who had connections with Swansea and were thinking about ideas of home and what America might mean in this context. I then found that Patti had left a profound impression on Wilde who had met her on his American tour and as a result, he referenced Patti in his novel The Picture Of Dorian Gray. This seemed to connect with the ideas of otherness that I had been exploring in my work. While the works are influenced by various ideas, I am not trying to tell a specific story in a photojournalistic way, they become starting points for a performative response.
I’m familiar with the significance of green carnations with Wilde, but does the sunflower stand for loyalty and longevity in this series?
The sunflowers were a symbol favoured by the aesthetic movement – Wilde, as one of the major figures of the aesthetic movement – was often caricatured as a sunflower. So I am using the sunflower in a symbolic sense – almost as a pallbearer at a funeral for the aesthete – bearing witness to the death and resurrection. Patti and Wilde are both buried in Père Lachaise cemetery, which seemed another curious connection to ideas of home, otherness and loss. What started as an obscure idea, branched out across nations and generations, and encompassed different perspectives on what home might represent.
words RHONDA LEE REALI