Brian S. Gee

Artist Statement

As an emerging multidisciplinary artist with generational roots in lens-based work, Brian Gee explores issues of identity construction and subversion, queer interconnectivity, and HIV/AIDS advocacy through installation, photography, and sculpture. His practice is deeply influenced by the multiple conflicting identities he has traversed: a theologically trained ex-christian atheist, a queer ex-husband and father of children from a 10 year marriage to a woman, the grandson of indigenous lineage cut-off from his paternal family, and a former violist who found his voice later in life in the visual arts.

Informed by these cycles of deconstructed and reconstructed identities, and bolstered by his intense study of contemporary queer art and critical theory, Brian uses the subjectivities inherent within strict approaches to identity formation systems to call into question their own theoretical assumptions while suggesting alternate trajectories of identity conceptualization and expressivity. By exposing the invisible, intimate threads that connect people to their constructed intra- and interpersonal relationships, Brian recontextualizes traditional tropes of self, family, faith, and community to illuminate new, queered expressions of authenticity and congruency outsite of prevailing (hetero)normative structures.

His practice is itself a metaphor for the potentialities inherent in deconstructed binaries. Brian is based between his adoptive home city of 15 years in Chicago, IL and his childhood home in Los Angeles, CA where he maintains a full-time career in brand and marketing consulting while acting as Board President for LATITUDE Chicago, a 501(c)(3) arts non-profit. Self-taught over nearly 15 years, Brian established his practice in 2019 and was selected for an honorable mention and a panel speaker position in his first group show, Interior Life, juried by Strange Fire Collective for Filter Space in 2020.

In his developing work, Brian is investigating the financial, racial, and communal inequities in access to life-saving medications for HIV as well as how those inequities have disproportionately prolonged a plague amongst certain members of the queer community. Simultaneously, he is advancing the artistic discourse on the intermediary role that beaches have played for the queer community, decentering past representations of fit, masculine-presenting whiteness to instead elevate the connections built in this communal safe space where generations of queer people have reconstructed their chosen families and bonds.