BY KRIS VAGNER
the curator of the university of nevada, reno’s art galleries has an off-caMpus exhibition of very personal artwork
“Damn,”
Photo/Kris Vagner
Curator Paul Baker Prindle shows off some of his own photography work documenting the seemingly anonymous sites of hate crimes.
18 | RN&R |
OCTOBER 8, 2015
I think. “I hope no one walks in.” I’m in a tiny, square gallery bleached by desert sunlight, looking at what is basically gay porn, full-frontal male nudity in frames on four close walls. There’s no classy drapery in the pictures to give me an art-historical justification, no luxurious lighting that would invite terms like “sensual” or “fine-art nude.” Just young, buff models, framed without heads, posed on beds, looking ready for intimate contact. If someone walks into this room, it’s going to be awkward. It’s not because the models are nude. Heck, I’ve been to art school. It’s because they make me feel alternately like a welcome voyeur and an intruder at the same time. The artist, Paul Baker Prindle, photographed unabashed views of male bodies, then built in clues and signifiers that say “keep your distance”: low lighting, fuzzy focus, glass so reflective it adds the viewer’s own face to the picture. The way the exhibit is installed adds a couple of more layers of barriers. A pile of gleaming white, cast porcelain human femur bones on the floor makes it so that you
have to view a row of Polariods from awkwardly far away. The Polaroids themselves are hung so low you almost have to stoop to see them. These pictures are definitely not one-liners. There were clearly some stories behind this work. Some of them, it turns out, are as simple as: My friends came over, took their clothes off and modeled for me. Others go a lot deeper into gay identity and culture.
My own private wisconsin Two days later, Baker Prindle, as gracious as his work is audacious, pours a cup of French press coffee in his office behind the Sheppard Contemporary Gallery at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he is the gallery director, and spins upward of 1,000 words per picture. He’s a Wisconsinite who credits a lot of his particular perspective on culture to the fact that he grew up gay at a moment when the very idea of growing up gay was changing rapidly. He went to high school in the 1990s. “My generation was the last one to have lived after the height of the AIDS epidemic, to become sexually active after that, and so we were the first to come out of it and
