Body//Weight at Gallery 120

Christopher Selleck exhibition • Now through Friday, November 10, 2023

Body//Weight, an exhibition by Christopher Selleck, is showing now through Friday, November 10, 2023, at Gallery 120. Art shows and exhibitions are hosted at the Gallery 120 brick-and-mortar location in the atrium of the Fine Arts building on the Inver Hills Community College campus in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota.

About Body//Weight

Today’s post-internet world provides numerous expressions of gender and desire. Masculinity can be experienced as something hard, sensual, shy, dangerous, feminine, or erotic. Yet social media can create hyper-comparison and competition between bodies, and for many men the pressure to achieve a sculpted body has hardened.

Selleck’s engagement with this terrain emerges from the pressures of being an overweight gay kid in the 90s for whom participation in masculinity was complicated by desire, but also by the fear of the isolation that would come with being outside its norms.

At the core of the exhibition are photographs of male weightlifters. Solicited online, these individuals were photographed against a draped backdrop in the artist’s studio, sometimes with gym props or engaged in exercise.

As such the works nod towards the tropes of physique photography, a genre that depicted semi-nude, muscular men popular from the 1900s through the 1960s. Where physique photography presented models as idealized types, Selleck takes these idealized bodies and presents them as people.

“I don’t filter according to age, race, or sexuality, what I am looking for is how they choose to present themselves to me in the studio environment,” Selleck said. “What I get is less a meditation on ‘toxic masculinity,’ than individuals projecting their gendered identity with a degree of vulnerability.”

The exhibition will feature a photo of the artist in gym gear with clicker in hand, and a pedestal with white-plaster casts of weights stacked to the artist’s height. These quiet self-portraits are bridges for the viewer to enter the world of the exhibition. The mirrored walls further invite introspection and comparison, but also perhaps spontaneity and joy.

Body//Weight is a contribution to a cross-generational conversation about how to deal with being a man. It focuses on a select community not out of complicity, but as a way to provide greater insight into the whole.

More about Christopher Selleck…

Christopher Selleck, Liam James Photography

Christopher Selleck was born in Augusta, Georgia. Selleck has spent the last 25+ years working in and around the arts in Minneapolis area. He received his B.F.A. in Photography from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in 2013 and his M.F.A. in Visual Studies and Photography from the Minneapolis College of Art & Design in 2016.

Using sports and masculinity as a lens to view identity, his various projects of the last few years have focused on this area of identity construction. His current projects address issues of hyper-masculinity, sexuality, and the male body.

His work has always had an affinity for traditional forms of photography, but with a more conceptual approach. Photographic prints and books have been central in his practice, but his work has also incorporated video, sound, installation, printmaking, book making, and sculpture.

Selleck has been exhibited and published both nationally and regionally. His first museum solo exhibition, Body//Weight, was on view in The U.S. Bank Gallery at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

WHAT: Body//Weight

WHO: Christopher Selleck

WHEN: Now thru November 10, 2023

WHERE: Gallery 120

Fine Arts Building
Inver Hills Community College
2500 80th Street East
Inver Grove Heights, MN 55076
General: 651-450-3000
Gallery 120: 651-450-3101