Impersonator
Caleb Yono
Gallery B
4.30 — 6.10
I started wearing makeup to high school in the late 1990s. One thing I have heard consistently since then was that I was hiding behind a mask. A mask of one's own making must surely express the inner depths. Glamour drags a lot to the surface. A made up face is a true face.
I was interested in painting Madonna impersonator portraits for several reasons. I like the idea of painting a painted /made up face. The thin film-like mask
makeup is magic. I’m interested in Madonna as a gay icon but also as an appropriator of culture. Someone who is a sort of impersonator herself. I don’t think of myself as a painter. I am impersonating a painter with these works. Madonna’s name sake places the work in to the spiritual realm of goddess worship.
I started with working from an image of a Madonna impersonator on a VHS box from 1991 called Female Impersonators. I then began working from images of Madonna at different points in her career. It occurred to me to work with images from the vhs on my TV screen. I fell in love with the glow and interlaced blur of the vhs. I really wanted to keep that in mind while painting.
I didn’t intend the work to be super political, however recent legislation banning drag- “Male/ female Impersonators” has invited Impersonators into a messy psychosexual drama with cis-conservatives that wish to regulate trans bodies and identities, while banning gender variance for children.
Caleb Yono (b. 1981) lives and works in Chicago, where they received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Caleb Yono works through representations of figures caught in moments of transformation and transmutation. Yono has exhibited in galleries and institutions including Beers London, Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center, the Chicago Cultural Center, Andrew Rafacz in Chicago, and Monya Rowe in New York. Yono has also worked extensively with s+s project in Mexico City and has performed and exhibited at the Centro Cultural del México Contemporáneo. They were the 2016 ACRE Residency performance scholar.