Michael Young

Artist Statement

"Hidden Glances" reframes vintage gay pornographic calendars into layered collages where absence is as charged as presence. By splicing and re-photographing figures, I create negative spaces that echo the covert ways I learned to see as a closeted youth. This manipulation collapses time in the past and turns images once meant for consumption into a meditation on identity, concealment, and visibility. Disrupting the calendars’ original narratives, the series suggests how queer histories—and truths—are pieced together from fragments and omissions, inviting viewers to consider the shifting negotiations of desire, shame, and self-preservation.

Artist Bio

Michael Young is a lens-based artist whose work explores themes of community, memory, personal and collective identity, and masculinity. He has been named a Top 50 artist in Photolucida’s Critical Mass (‘23 and ‘21). Recent shows include Behind Closed Doors at the Ravestijn Gallery (Netherlands), Sharp Cuts at CLAMP in New York City, and Currents 2023 at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Young’s work has been published in Deeply Human (Verlag Kettler) and GUP’s Fresh Eyes 2023. His work has also appeared in Musée Magazine, Fisheye, Der Greif, EXIT, LensCulture, Lenscratch, Humble Arts Foundation, Fraction, and The Guardian.

A Drink by the Pool, February, 2022