El Angel
Presents close corners and encounters in a piercing and introspective display.
El Angel | Beau Gomez
Exhibition: Oct 20 - Nov 26th, 2022
Gallery Hours: Wednesdays to Saturdays, 1 - 6 pm
Opening Reception: Oct 20th, @7pm
TLC: An El Angel Roundtable: Oct 22nd, Saturday @2-4pm
Fixer°2 Community Critique Sessions : Nov 5th, Saturday @4 - 7PM
El Angel presents close corners and encounters in a piercing and introspective display. Throughout the exhibition, storytelling is embodied through an array of audio, and still and moving imagery. This work unveils the nuances of Asian queerness at a crossroads with upbringing, kinship, desire, and disclosure. It examines the possibilities of conversation and dialogue, and the personal and public normativities that shape even our most intimate revelations. With the artist as documenter and his subjects as collaborators, the stories woven throughout El Angel reveal their lived realities: all of it as freeing, restrained, celebratory and painful as they come.
In his book Lacuna Park: Essays and Other Adventures in Photography, writer and curator Nicholas Muellner (2019) speaks of photography as a medium that has never meant anything singular. “Photography is best understood across time as a set of relations, and a way of engaging: with oneself, with the world, and with others. A surface for feeling.” El Angel resonates by confronting one’s interiority and the emotional self; photographs, video footage and recorded conversations intimately capture individual and shared reflections. While this imagery ranges widely from the quotidian to the poetic, they always come through significant and intentional.
El Angel stands as a testament to the importance of bearing witness and, in effect, mutual care. The work further encourages viewers to acknowledge the complexities in which identity and community are kept private or are shared, are experienced or (mis)understood. Through its tenderness and intimacy, the works in El Angel evoke unguarded immediacy, however fragmented or fleeting these moments may be.
Beau Gomez
Beau Gomez is a lens-based artist whose practice is informed by ideas, challenges and conversations around cross-cultural narratives, as they relate to positions of queerness and community. A portraitist at heart, his work is anchored by image-making and storytelling as conduits between one person’s experiences to another, giving permission to shared means of reckoning, reconditioning, and nurturing.
His work has been exhibited by the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, Magenta Foundation and Toronto International Film Festival. Along with his artistic practice, he devotes his time to community engagement, and has contributed to various organizations including Reel Asian Film Festival, The Site Magazine, Pride Toronto/Montréal and Critical Distance Centre for Curators. In 2019, Beau launched Fixer, a gathering of emerging image-makers, writers and creative thinkers in an engaged critique on recent works in progress. He is an upcoming artist-in-residence at VU Photo (Quebec City) in Spring 2023, and is a presenting artist for the annual Day With(out) Art 2023 (New York). Beau holds a BFA in Photography Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University.
