Silas Wamsley

Lives and works in Halifax, NS, Canada

Artist statement

My work is inspired by 15th century Italian Quattrocento painters such as Carlo Crivelli and Cosmé Tura, whose paintings combine the intricate ornamentation and iconography of Gothic era with the meticulous realism and emotional intensity of Renaissance art. I infuse this early Renaissance aesthetics with queer contemporary logics, presenting a visual language rooted in trans/crip studies of ecology, calling into question colonial systems of categorization that distinguish animal from human, subject from object, self from other. My visual language expresses a complex relationship between corporeal and extracorporeal notions of being. I depict human, and human-ish, beings in transitional states, spouting hooves and horns, vines, and thorns. Though rendered with naturalism, they hold unnatural postures as if they are suspended in time, floating in opulent spaces unbounded by the laws of physics and gravity. They are adorned with ornate headwear, capes, and armour, and carry delicate, beautiful, and arcane objects with ceremonial reverence. Articulating a productive, and distinctly queer ambivalence toward ontological distinctions between sacred and profane, body and spirit, real and symbolic, my work eschews the hierarchies, binaries, and fixed iconography that gave 15th century religious art its legibility. Instead, I explore how bodies, identities, and symbols are unfixed and impermanent, encouraging viewers to interpret my work (and by extension, the world) through the...

Artwork