Intimacy // Steven Beckly
Recently I discovered my need of intimacy. I don’t mean hooking up with just anyone or simply getting physical. It’s not even necessarily about exchange of fluids. Intimacy had turned to a kitsch accessory I hide behind the pillow for a while, but now I’m all about it. Maybe it’s the winter. Or maybe it’s the music I am listening to.
It’s hard to find intimacy in Berlin tho.
Anyway, here comes an artist whose main media of expression is intimacy right after photography.
Steven Beckly is a photo-based artist living and working in Toronto, Canada. His artistic practice explores the complexities of identity, relationships, intimacy, and sexuality in contemporary experience. Blending diaristic, documentary, and cinematographic approaches, his work predominantly employs portraiture infused with biographical elements and idealized fiction. Performance plays an important role in his process, and constructed environments provide the context for his images.
He is interested in reconstructing personal and intimate realities and replaying emotional conditions to transform ordinary moments into universal sentiments. Seemingly fictionalized characters are placed in fragmented and open-ended narratives, creating space for imagined structure, context, and meaning. By exploring the connections between the individual, the collective, and their environments, he continually aspires to portray emotional intricacies that comprise and reveal layers of human experience.
