Nick
Simko

Football

Using lens-based photography and digital imaging, Football is an exercise in representing normative, white, able-bodied cisgender male formations in the terms of race, gender, embodiment, and orientation. I wanted to visually corporealize these intersections instead of privileging them as universal, transparent, and all-encompassing. Isolated away from the din of the football field, the subjects of these images echo the scale and style of monumental portraits and tapestries, specifically by citing works designed for the sixteenth-century palaces of the white European ruling class. Computerized filters approximate the nuanced texture of painted brushstrokes. Ultimately, Football frames portraiture as a process that renders human bodies as fluctuating surfaces upon which culture projects, incises, and embeds its ideals.