?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
COYOTE PARK (1999- )
River and Coyote Dreaming. Inkjet print, the image measuring 838x1270 mm; 33x50 inches, flush mounted; framed. 2022.
This work is accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity signed by the artist in ink, with the title, medium, date, and edition notation 1/5.
In this image, Park and their loved one River recline in a tranquil, mutually supportive pose in front of a draped backdrop, flanked by botanical arrangements. Picturing bare and minimally clothed bodies in verdant nature (though shot in the studio), the photograph evokes the motif of the pastoral nude, which in Western art reached its peak at the end of the nineteenth century. At that time, it became associated with various avant-garde movements and their eschewal of social and artistic norms. Park makes reference to works by photographers Wilhelm von Gloeden and Tee A. Corrine, also on view in the exhibition. Radically separated by culture and time, von Gloeden and Corrine staged their respective tableaux with equal care in creating idealized, culturally specific spaces for queer erotics. Von Gloeden used props to conjure an imagined homophilic utopia of classical antiquity, while Corinne obscured her subjects bodies, allowing flowers, landscapes, and other natural elements to stand in for depictions of lesbian sexuality. While sharing these earlier artists' concern with how queer bodies are sexualized, Park's practice bears the additional weight of the white, cis gaze on trans bodies of color. As if in response, Park and River rest in an Arcadia of their own construction, their eyes closed to the viewer.
Provenance: Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Collection, New York.
