Shadow Cast

PHOTOGRAPHY

Dec 3

Shadow Cast is the latest handmade, limited edition book by lens-based artist Pacifico Silano. For this series, Silano reworked vintage gay porn into evocative, melancholic typologies, transforming shadows into a visceral exploration of desire, marginality, and longing. Printed entirely on risograph, this XXL photobook is a tactile and experimental masterpiece, published by Loose Joints.

Photography Pacifico Silano

Shadow Cast is the latest handmade, limited edition book by lens-based artist Pacifico Silano. Known for his practice of excavating melancholy, tension, emotion, and friction from vintage gay pornography, Silano continues his exploration of the dark interior of queer identity through this evocative work. Shadow Cast follows Silano's Aperture-nominated experimental Leporello hardcover I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine, shifting focus to life-size, gritty headshots, obscured beyond recognition through rasterization and printing. Silano's conceptual gestures of reframing comment on marginality, with his subjects literally kept in the shadows, speaking of a mental hidden space pulsing with desire and longing. Printed entirely on the risograph and laden with ink, this oversized artist's book is corporeal in scale, blowing Silano's Shadows up to life-size crops. Shadows is hand stab-stitched with a silk-screen cover, transforming it into a covetable design object that elevates Silano's ephemeral approach into an experimental publishing gesture. Limited to just 500 signed and numbered copies, Shadow Cast is a testament to Silano's ability to comment on queer identity through a unique and intimate lens.

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Silano's reworking of queer archives enters a darkened space of reflection in his haunting typologies of obscured men, in a handmade limited oversized artist's book.

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Shadow Cast, published by Loose Joints

72 pages, 410 × 510 mm
Handmade risograph oversized artist's book, Drilled binding with removable clasp with silkscreened acetate cover
Edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon
Limited edition of 500, each signed and numbered by the artist.

The limited edition book is now available from Loose Joints

About Pacifico

Pacifico Silano is an artist whose work is an exploration of print culture and LGBTQ identity. Born in Brooklyn, NY, he received his MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts.

He has had work included in numerous group exhibitions including the Bronx Museum; Tacoma Art Museum; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; International Center for Photography and The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Select solo exhibitions include Baxter ST@CCNY, Rubber-Factory, The Houston Center for Photography, The Bronx Museum of Arts, Fragment Gallery, Monti8, Luis De Jesus Gallery and Island Gallery.

Reviews of his work have appeared in The New Yorker, Financial Times and The Washington Post. Awards include the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship, and the NYFA Fellowship in Photography. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Silano's artist book I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine was published by Loose Joints in 2021 and was a finalist for the Aperture–Paris Photo Photobook Award.

To see more of his work, visit his website or follow him on Instagram

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Shadow Cast

Silano's reworking of queer archives enters a darkened space of reflection in his haunting typologies of obscured men, in a handmade limited oversized artist's book.

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