Today we’d like to introduce you to John Waiblinger.
John, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
My art is deeply engaged with exploring my sensibilities about male beauty, “gay” romance and relationship. I believe my work is Queer and deeply transgressive in that I wish to challenge standard tropes of masculinity with something softer, more tender, often set within a textured background of “Mother Nature” – a sort of antidote to the Tom of Finland portrayal of hyper-masculinity and a uniformed, S&M caricature-like vision of gay sex.
As an “effeminate gay” identified man, the concept and performance of masculinity has always been a key issue in my life. Not as a theoretical concept, but as a key to my very survival. Even as a young boy, I quickly became aware of the necessity to perform gender in a socially acceptable manner or risk social ostracism and physical violence. Psychic and physical survival literally became dependent of my ability to grasp the rules of performing “masculinity” to the best of my ability, even when those roles were not intuitive or inherent in my “nature”. Peer-to-peer lessons in performing incorrectly could be extremely brutal and painful.
I’ve been making art in my head forever – in my fantasies, daydreams and desires and with a constant look-out for anything culturally subversive in the media, the arts and politics – anything that illuminated a subversive way of performing masculinity. But it has only been recently (since 2012) that I began creating a physical manifestation of that interior vision. Beginning the process of becoming “an artist” at the tender age of 58 is rather a late time to bloom, but it has allowed me to bring a wealth of experience and thinking into my process. While initially, this act of creating was somewhat accidental, I knew immediately that it was something I’ve craved all my life and wanted to express and share.
Ultimately my art is about exploring who I am. It is my hope that it will stimulate others to undertake those explorations as well…
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
In my art, I explore the mystery of why I find some men so beautiful and so intriguing. I use found images from the Internet’s vast store of gay pornography and combine them with my own photographs to articulate a relationship with those men. I consider the work Post Photography in that I am “making” a new photograph that is specific to my internal point of view.
The work presents the men I’ve appropriated via their pornographic performance and reconstructs them within the realm of my imagination. I manipulate these images to portray a masculinity that celebrates softness and a different type of edge, creating a tension between the normative and the transgressive. Pornography tends to objectify whereas I prefer to romanticize. My intent is to investigate and illustrate how such juxtaposition can broaden perceptions and understandings of masculinity.
Do you have any advice for other artists? Any lessons you wished you learned earlier?
Follow your own vision and then just do it. There is a wonderful community of artists in Los Angeles – make the effort to connect with other artists, go out to galleries and art events and get inspired. The “art world” here in LA is more friendly and welcoming than I would ever have imagined.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
People can explore my work on my website. I show regularly at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art: http://www.lacda.com – so would be delighted to meet you there.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://johnwaiblinger.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnwaiblingerart
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnwaiblingerart
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/JohnWaiblinger
Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
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