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Things “R” Queer
Things "R" Queer punctuates Aperture's newly published history of Food Photography Feast for the Eyes available here. This series ushers in new cycles of art and food photography by embracing one of the latest iterations of visual culture, Instagram, as its initial platform for circulation. Taking the trope of food porn on social media as his prompt, Maida crafts subversive tableaux with purposeful doses of Pop Art humor, advertising gloss, and Japanese kawaii and then photographs his colorful sculptures in a matter-of-fact, documentary-style. His images, which are historically “straight” in their aesthetics and lack of manipulation, are undoubtedly queer in their campy visualization of a fantasy-cum-critique of contemporary material culture. -
New Natives
New Natives are a group of portraits of aspiring male models of mixed ethnicity and race from Hawaii. The subjects are scouted from New York through social media and photographed in their local terrain around the metropolis of Honolulu. Drawing from Hawaii’s royal history as well as its Eastern and Western influences, this series introduces visions of masculinity, identity, and sexuality, which upend conventional hegemony on multiple registers. New Natives is available as a limited edition monograph published by L'Artiere here. -
Dream Factory
Dream Factory / 夢ファクトリー (2007-2012) is a visual exploration of the promises and shortcomings of postwar Japan as it reflects and reinterprets the American Dream. This projects highlights the complexities of this island nation, which enjoyed the benefits of subscribing to American ideologies since the 1950's, as it is now eclipsed by China's economic might. A documentation of Japan's contemporary material culture, Dream Factory magnifies the dazzling surface and complicated underbelly of the broader capitalist world. -
Ben
Ben (2011-2000) presents a solitary figure playing dress-up in his hermetic world of narcissism, posturing, and mirrors. Inspired by Frank Wedekind’s Springs Awakening and Jean Baudrillard’s Ecstasy of Communication, this series casts the viewer as a privileged voyeur, who witnesses the flowering of Ben's adulthood desire and his changing relationship to the domestic spaces of his adolescence. -
Interior Portraits
Interior Portraits (1999-2008) depicts fellow artists at homes to investigate how they define themselves, and are defined, by the places they inhabit, the clothes they wear, the rituals they perform, and the objects that surround them. These pictures highlight everyday desires, both primal and prescribed, and consider what individuals long for after they have acted on, and fulfilled, their habituated wishes. -
Isaac
Isaac (2003-present) is an ongoing series of portraits about time, place, perception, and desire. Unlike Georgia (Alfred Stiegitz), Eleanor (Harry Callahan), Edith (Emmet Gowin), and Maria (Lee Friedlander), Isaac, a man, is the subject of this photographic series. This project channels a broader history of the figure in art by confronting the photographic paradigm of woman as muse over the last century. -
Nan
Nan (1995-2007) is a visual diary of the golden years of Maida’s maternal grandmother. Born Annunziata in 1920 -- but known by her Americanized name, Nancy -- Nan, who was raised to be a 1950's homemaker, embodies the complexities and contradictions of the postwar America woman. Inspired by Sirkian melodramas, this series relishes in the veneer of American prosperity while illuminating the underbelly of growing old in a culture of youth, beauty, and consumption. -
Local Service
Local Service (1999 - present) documents small, independent companies and mom-and-pop shops across the United States in the age of big-box stores, online retail, and billion-dollar corporations.
Joseph Maida
