My Cowgirl is a Centerfold

CoMING out of the pandemic and the first Trump administration, Brian Spies began this body of work in tandem with her own emerging transgender awakening. The American cowboy, long a queer shorthand for a certain type of masculine gay person, also embodies a foundational element of the American political zeitgeist. In using her own masc coded body as a canvas for examining what it means to embody one's identity within the narrow framework considered permissable, she shows a certain vunerablity mixed with a sort of theatrical exhibitionism. Her work, equal parts self-portrait photography and pertormance art, they act as an ongoing record documenting a soliloquy of radical defiance. If queer joy is a revolutionary act then these photographs document a disruptive, unapologetic revolutionary war. Inspired as much by Robert Mapplethorpe, Catherine Opie and queer cinema like Pink Narcissus, The films of Passolini and Fassbinder and more recent films like Tears of The Black Tiger, Spies creates what the director of Peter Kelly Gallery, Peter Williams, has called "a burlesque Cindy Sherman". The photographs explore gender and identity through the consumate American archetype of masculinity, the cowboy. In her photo-graphs, Spies exposes the artificial, unnaturall armature of this construction and its continued resonance in a 21st century global culture where both masculinity and America's dominance quite rightly are waning. These are both an elegy and a fiery, flaming effigy for and of a world that is no longer worthy of remembrance