August 2011
BORIS TORRES / MIDNITE
New Paintings & Watercolors
August 5 – 28, 2011
Vernissage Friday August 5 / 7 – 10pm
Beats by Big Mac Daddy
Proudly sponsored by CKCU 93.1 FM & MERCURY
The artist will be present for the opening, coming all the way from New York.
Statement: “I love to paint – to transform the medium (primarily oil paint and watercolor) into images that entice me. The paintings experiment with technical concerns of the medium, while also foregrounding issues that fascinate and confound me within the complexities of sexuality, gender and race. I aspire to celebrate and interrogate these subjects and create images that both challenge and embrace the viewer”.
BIO:
Boris Torres is a painter originally from Ecuador who grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Veneklasen/Werner Gallery in Berlin, Bowman Bloom Gallery, Parlor Projects, Art in General, Center for Book Arts, LGBT Community Center, Dumbo Arts Center and in Butt Magazine, and he has an upcoming exhibitions in July 2011 at La Petite Mort Gallery in Ottawa, Canada and in November at La Naranjilla Mecánica in Quito, Ecuador. His work will be published in Art and Queer Culture, edited by Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer, Phaidon Press, 2012. He currently teaches an undergraduate painting class at Brooklyn College.
ALSO FEATURED: ‘Last Address’ by New York filmmaker Ira Sachs
“Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, Norman René, Peter Hujar, Ethyl Eichelberer, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cookie Mueller, Klaus Nomi….the list of New York artists who died of AIDS over the last 30 years is countless, and the loss immeasurable. In ‘Last Address’, filmmaker Ira Sachs (The Delta, Married Life, and the 2005 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning Forty Shades of Blue), who first moved to the city himself in 1984, uses mages of the exteriors of the houses, apartment buildings, and lofts where these and others were living at the time of their deaths to mark the disappearance of a generation. The elegiac film is both a remembrance of that loss, as well as an evocation of the continued presence of their work in our lives and culture.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT:
I made Last Address because now that I’m in my 40s, I realize even more how I’ve had no mentors, so few models even, for how to live a creative life as a gay man, and how I’m winging it, on my own. So many of the men I might have learned from, read about in the papers, seen in the streets, met in a bar, in a theater, died from AIDS in the years before I might have known them. I first lived in New York in the summer of 1984 – punk was still big, and the Pyramid Club, and the Ridiculous Theater, and the East Village scene, but I was a kid. It seemed like it would last forever, but then it was all gone….Haring, Mapplethorpe, Ludlam, and people I knew more closely, like the painter Hugh Steers, the director Norman René, my boyfriend Jim Lyons. In just under 25 years, they were all gone. I feel like I’m finding my own way. I wish they were here”.
Thank you,
Guy Berube, director
La Petite Mort Gallery