August 2024 AIR: James Hosking
James’ work explores identity and intimacy
Hey James! The lab is so happy to have you for our August residency! Your work is so intricate and balanced, how do you incorporate color, mood, form and meaning into each collage?
I’m excited to be a resident! Latitude did a fantastic job printing work for my recent exhibitions, and the lab staff were wonderful, patient partners.
Since 2022, I’ve been working on an archival collage series entitled The Personals. These works are made from my collection of LGBTQ+ ephemera, as well as the holdings of Chicago’s Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, the largest LGBTQ+ archive in the Midwest. I use scanned images from LGBTQ+ newspapers and magazines, plus found photos and textures, to recontextualize marginalized material from 1966 to 1981, roughly the period between the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco and the emergence of HIV/AIDS.
The pieces are inspired by contemporaneous found personal ads, some of which are reproduced in the compositions. The anonymous authors of the personals become imagined protagonists. Conceptually, the works are intended to fit together as a loose narrative derived from a speculative space between the imagined and the real.
In the works, I play with obfuscation and allusion, layering textures and images. I primarily obscure faces to make the subjects anonymous, like the original writers of the personal ads themselves. As I create a work, content sometimes determines the shapes of the collage layers. In other instances, the shapes come first, and I adjust the content to fit inside them.
I’m inspired by vernacular quilts, like those from Gee’s Bend, as well as by Bauhaus and Constructivist design. The tradition of trompe l'oeil painting and its illusion of depth informs the collages’ spatial approaches. I’m also influenced by the vibrant history of print art direction and design, particularly the striking, idiosyncratic choices around type and color in many LGBTQ+ publications of the era.
I’m interested in typography as a textural element, and so the collages incorporate personal ads and erotica order forms, as well as ads for nightspots and adult theaters, often layered on top of the images. I’m always looking for source material that exhibits wear and age, as well as the original price stickers. These imperfections communicate a sense of history and connect objects to their past consumers.
I look forward to talking about my process more during my upcoming Latitude public program.
Can you talk about how identity and representation play out in your work?
As I make this series, I ask myself: What was it like to live during this era as an LGBTQ+person? How did LGBTQ+ visual media influence people’s self-conceptions? How can I imaginatively explore either specific individual personal ads and/or, more broadly, the world of the personal ads?
In the era in which the series takes place, LGBTQ+ identity was becoming more visible, despite discrimination and violence. I explore the push-pull between fear and uncertainty, acceptance and pleasure. As LGBTQ+ rights are under attack anew, the series centers and celebrates LGBTQ+ intimacy in an open and direct way. My aim is to explore the overlooked visual history and voices of my LGBTQ+ community, as well as my own queer selfhood and relationships. I hope viewers will find the collages evocative not only of the past but of their own inner life. I continue to visit Gerber/Hart and create new works in this series. They collectively number more than 150.
What is something you often don’t get to share or talk about in your practice?
I trained to be a professional dancer until I was 19, and I was also interested in pursuing a career in choreography. In a way, the collages are a vehicle for me to connect to the spatial possibilities of the body. In making the collages, I discover and isolate moments of gesture and line from larger images. I’m always striving to create a sense of depth and movement, though the collages are static 2-D objects (for now).
James Hosking
James Hosking is a Chicago-based visual artist whose work explores underseen communities and archives, particularly of LGBTQ+ people, and principally themes of identity and intimacy through photo, film, and collage. His work has screened internationally and appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and many other publications. He is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow in visual arts. Developed over several years, his Beautiful By Night documentary photo series and film focuses on three older drag performers in San Francisco. The project was featured in numerous national and international publications, including Mother Jones and The Washington Post, and in screenings and exhibitions at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF) and the Tenderloin Museum (SF). It was also the focus of a 2022 solo show at the University of Michigan. He was a 2022–2023 HATCH resident at the Chicago Artists Coalition, where he presented pieces from a new archival collage series, The Personals, made from LGBTQ+ newspapers and magazines, found photos, and textures. Thematically, these works are inspired by personal ads from the 1960s and ’70s, some of which are reproduced in the compositions. He received a 2023 Illinois Arts Council Individual Artist Support grant and a 2023 DCASE Individual Artist Program grant from the city of Chicago to support this series. Pieces have been recently exhibited at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art and Gerber/Hart Library and Archives. He developed The Personals during his 2024 MacDowell Fellowship in visual arts and will continue work on it during his Latitude residency. James Hosking is currently the Art Director of the Chicago Reader.