MONICA MAJOLI

Her work often depicts scenes of sexual fetishism, a theme that serves as a decoy for larger underlying political concerns. Since 2015 Majoli has developed a series titled Blueboys, named after one of the earliest national gay magazines, founded by Donald N. Embinder and published from 1974 to 2007. Majoli focuses on the centerfolds from the magazine from around 1976 to 1979, the halcyon years of gay liberation, when homosexuality was understood to be politically charged and under threat. To the artist, these images showcase a tragedy that had yet to unfold, as they were photographed on the cusp of the AIDS epidemic. Majoli’s Blueboys series is a rumination on illness, loss, and history via images born of liberation, an attempt to locate and document a period when queer political and sexual identities became visible to a larger public.

In these works Majoli scales up images culled from Blueboy through a white-line printmaking technique developed in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the early twentieth century, primarily by women artists who were influenced by traditional Japanese woodcuts. The making of these works is described by the artist as deeply related to their content: they are produced through what is essentially a transfer process wherein the image itself is partially lost, or ghosted, while printed. The white carved line creates an impression of a negative, an image turned inside out. The outcome reveals the interplay between what the artist can control and the mechanics and materials of making, which override her hold on the image.

Text courtesy Hammer Museum