John Waiblinger at Los Angeles Center for Digital Art

Reception: Saturday, October 13, 6-9pm
Artwalk preview: Thursday, October 11, 7-9pm

John Waiblinger is a new media artist who explores masculinity and desire though his post-photography compositions. Hailing from an academic background with degrees in English, Women's Studies and Library Science, Waiblinger redefined himself as an artist in his early 60s, first exhibiting work at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art.

The Beauty of Men* (an iconography of desire) is Waiblinger's first solo show, appropriately taking place at the gallery in which he first showed his work. His work presents men he has appropriated via their pornographic performance and reconstructs then within the realm of his imagination. He chooses to use these images combined with his own photographs to portray a masculinity that celebrates softness and intimacy that he believes creates a tension between the normative and the transgressive. He states that his intent is "to investigate and illustrate how such juxtaposition can broaden perceptions and understanding of masculinity."

Waiblinger uses his fixation on the beauty of men to transfigure the carnal into his own embodiments of adoration and celebration.

http://johnwaiblinger.com