On Sunday, June 5 at 8:30 pm, AD Projects will host Scott Valentine’s first performance, ima cake boi. Scott’s artistic practice incorporates relationism and participation into photography, video, and now performance. In ima cake boi, Scott combines video, sound, culinary arts, and gymnastics to analyze the transcendent power of visual symbols in creating a vocabulary of gay male identity.
The eighteenth century philosopher and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann wrote extensively on Greek gymnasium exercises, lauding the opportunity these calisthenic performances allowed for audiences to observe the harmony of the ideal male body within the spectacle of the arena. In an irreverent tribute to Winckelmann’s ideals, ima cake boi recontextualizes a gymnastics floor routine. Scott culls various historical, humorous and obscene photographs and video clips from the history of the constructed American masculine identity, creating a video backdrop that gives the viewer, and Winckelmann, their just desserts.
Scott Valentine was born in Twin Falls, Idaho and received his BA in 2007 from University of Puget Sound in Art History and Criticism, with a focus on sociology, visual studies, and photography. His work questions the various binaries between hetero and queer identities and interrogates the ways technological innovation touches the social, political, and voyeuristic realms of contemporary culture. Scott was an active gymnast during his childhood, but a serious injury prevented his assent in the world of competitive gymnastics. Now he questions the stereotype of gay warriors and athletes as inherently weak in physical endurance sports.
For more information, email info@adprojects.org.
See more photos of the performance
