Theo Vasiloudes

My work revels in the contradictions of navigating intimacy in contemporary gay life. My current research uses both archival histories and the ephemeral histories of personal experience to examine how cruising – the queer practice of finding casual sex in public spaces – has shifted in the context of digital life. Looking at the network of interactions facilitated by the semi-public space of Grindr, Scruff and other location-based hook up apps, my interdisciplinary practice interrogates the role these apps play in structuring and mediating relationships within the queer community in ways that are simultaneously empowering and alienating.

My body of work for RCA 2023 considers the gridded interface of Grindr – one that is equally self-indulgent and utilitarian, displaying near unbridled sexual expression while visually putting people into boxes. The main work, looking, examines this through projections onto glass blocks, referencing both the illuminated glass of a touchscreen and the tenuous privacy of a bathroom window. In conversation with this, a series of works which I'm calling "manifests" use the glass blocks as display cases that can never be opened, entrapping objects from my own bedside table inside of them. Also on view are a series of experiments - "deformations" - that challenge the rigid, yet fragile structures of masculinity that Grindr plays a part in circulating. Reshaping these mass produced blocks of glass with high heat, I create objects that are at once familiar and alien; suggestions of the bodily frozen in glass.

portrait by Sung Hoon Soon