Selected Show Installation Images
Sugar Daddy: Dear Danielle
Denny Gallery, Tribeca, NYC
"My name is Sean Fader. I am a queer artist and a professor at Tulane University. I am writing to you from Stove Works, an artist residency in Chattanooga Tennessee. I have been asked to produce a piece for a show at Antenna Gallery that will open as part of a multivenue triennial in New Orleans. The exhibition’s theme is sugar, and I decided to investigate the history of the sugar daddy, in particular the story of Adolph Spreckels and Alma de Bretteville Spreckels. I was immediately consumed by their story which eventually led me to you.”
Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art
Curated by Tina Rivers Ryan and Paul Vanouse
Albright-Knox Northland, 612 Northland Avenue, Buffalo, New York 14211
In response to ongoing conversations about systemic inequities, Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art brings together a diverse group of seventeen artists and collectives who creatively reimagine the digital tools that shape our lives.
THIRST/ TRAP
Curated by Scott Patrick Weiner
Denny Dimin Gallery 39 Lispenard Street, New York, NY 10013
Thirst/Trap bookends the past twenty years of LGBTQIA history, looking back to 1999-2000 as a crucial moment. The past twenty-year period saw the rise of the internet, and Fader’s project examines the role of digital photography and queer representation (or lack of it) at the beginning and end of this two-decade transformation.
You Never Know How You Look Through Other People's Eyes
Curated by Scott Patrick Weiner
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine College of Art, ME, 2018
“Cinnamon and sugary and softly spoken lies, you never know just how you look through other people’s eyes.” – Gibby Haynes, 1996
In the summer of 1996 pop culture gave us the song Pepper by the Butthole Surfers. Deceptively playful, the lyrics make clear the impossibility of having first-hand knowledge of the self by boldly stating that you can never fully know who you are to someone else. The artists involved allow their works to exist sympathetically and in spite of each other for an exhibition that proposes a state of coexistence at odds with itself. Within this experimental framework they free and restrict through unpredictability. All involved are both collective collaborator and individual practitioner within a complex network that confirms and denies the possibilities of true egalitarianism toward some kind of antagonistic equilibrium.
365 Profile Pics
Spring/Break Art Show with Denny Gallery, LES, NY, 2017
Over the course of 365 days I posted a new profile picture each day on Facebook and Instagram and invited reactions from my community of friends and followers. These profile pictures were created in Photoshop by retouchers from around the world. I hired these professionals via such Websites as Craigslist, Fiverr, and Freelancer, and asked them to digitally create these images for me. I provided each of them with 400 green-screened selfies and directed them to create new profile pics for me that “make me look amazing and my life look awesome.” The retouchers then Photoshopped images of me with images they found on the Internet to digitally construct my profile pics. The altered images have no correlation with my own identity but instead, reflect each retoucher’s idea of what I might aspire to be.
Share This! Appropriation After Cynicism
Denny Gallery, NYC, 2015
Share This! Appropriation After Cynicism is an exhibition of artists who appropriate the work of other artists. Share This! was a group show that included Backdrop for the Rebirth of the Collective Author (“There’s a Whole Lot of Authorship Going On.” - Richard Prince).
I’ll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours: Love In The Modern Age
Esteven Art Gallery and Museum, Saskatchewan, Canada, 2015
I’ll Show You Mine, If You Show Me Yours: Love in the Modern Age explores the intersection between interpretation, invention and expectation when it comes to internet dating. Each artists' series in this exhibition, while examining different aspects of this world wide phenomenon, is tied to using the personal to explore an experience that is niche yet universal at the same time. Whether in rural Saskatchewan or one of the largest urban centres of the world, regardless of age, race, gender, or sexual orientation, people are talking about this experience. Using three artists who media, perspective and experiences differ, I’ll Show You Mine, If You Show Me Yours: Love in the Modern Age casts a broad net to initiate a conversation on a topic that is no longer taboo but rather more of the norm.
#wishingpelt
Curated by Elizabeth Denny
Spring/Break Art Show, NYC, NY, 2014
Curated by Elizabeth Denny for SPRING/BREAK PUBLICPRIVATE, Sean Fader is the #wishingpelt. For this interactive performance piece, visitors are invited to make a wish upon his chest hair. Fader’s chest hair has been imbued with the magic of the ages. One rub of his prodigious body beard, and your problems become ancient history. Participants in the #wishingpelt will whisper their wish in his ear, run their hands through his chest hair, and seal the wish with selfie tagged on Instagram or Twitter with #wishingpelt. Photos will be made PUBLIC/ Wishes will be kept PRIVATE.
#wishingpelt
Sponsored by AKArt
Pulse Project, Pulse Art Fair, NYC, NY, 2014
Under the direction of Helen Toomer, newly appointed Director, PULSE presents a revitalized platform for discovering contemporary art and demonstrates its commitment to the exchange of ideas from pioneering and seasoned artists. Fader’s May 2014 site-specific iteration of #WISHINGPELT—created specifically for PULSE—will feature elements which play with aspects of the commercial arena of the art fair and the greater art market. Visitors will photograph their experiences and post images and comments on Instagram with the hashtag #wishingpelt. An archive of these moments from past performances—a monument to the faithful who have experienced the mystery and magic of the pelt—appear at wishingpelt.com.
Manly Men, Girly Girls and Everybody in Between
NIU Art Museum, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 2014
This exhibition explores expressions of the sex/gender continuum in the arts. The artwork on view poses questions about how we see ourselves or how others perceive us, in addition to recognizing the broad spectrum of gender identity.
The Participants
Denny Gallery, NYC, 2014
Not content to accept the lives and limits given to them, these artists embed themselves in communities and social practices in order to re-create their pasts and their futures. They engage with these communities not as knowing observers or objective commentators but as earnest contributors. Their work takes the form of social media, photography, performance events, sculpture, and durational concepts, and it revolves around their dedication to opening their lives to new solidarities and populations. From the retracing of parental sex partners to re-imagined youthful memories to looking for love and authenticity online and in real time, these artists undertake practices that alter their lives and their social worlds. Rather than offering ironic critique or self-satisfied oppositionalism, the Participants risk making their lives porous with their art in order to remap their loves and their days. They search for ways to remake their own histories, to re-imagine their futures, and to establish sympathies in unexpected or disavowed locations.
How to do Things With Hair
Curated by Barrak Alzaid
The JamJar Dubai, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2013
Hair performs gender, but by removing it from its representational role ‘how to do things with hair’ restages male body hair as a technology with transformative potential.
White Boys
Curated by Hank Willis Thomas and Natasha L. Logan,
The Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford University, Philadelphia PA, 2013
White Boys charts the ways artists are aestheticizing white, male identity in the United States today. Privilege, invisibility, fear, anxiety, purity, emptiness, cowardice–whiteness and masculinity conjure an array of competing associations, emotions and imagery. Taken together, they present a perspective paradoxically ever-present and ever-absent: white is both the sum of all colors and no color at all. But how have whiteness and masculinity ‘evolved’ as relational constructs vis-a-vis blackness, femininity, and sexuality, modes of otherness that have often been scrutinized and alienated? Where are these terms’ entrenchments, and where do they become more pliant? Through photography, video, painting, printmaking and sculpture, the ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ artists of White Boys variously imagine male whiteness within this broader network of racial and sexual tropes and identities, marking seeming commonalities and more subtle gradations.