Nathan Manna

For Greener Pastures: Excavations and Research in Search of the Origins of Gay Semiotics

materials funded: wide-format printer, paper, ink

In these photo collages, Nathan Manna pays homage to Worcester artist John O’Reilly. O’Reilly’s small, complex photo collages are renowned nationally for their fluid combination of Old Master artworks and pre-modern literary images with gay erotica, self-portraits, and theatrical sets, a private language of references and symbols Manna understands as a kind of gay semiotics, or iconography.

Manna’s artwork is in pursuit of a queer utopia, an idea disseminated by influential theorist José Esteban Muñoz, an idea of an ethereal realm that transcends time and centers pleasure, where gay sexual pleasure is not debased, but idyllic, or even holy. Manna writes:

The next step in my process as an artist is to create work that challenges and threatens the straight viewer. To be gay, to be queer is to challenge a mainstream heteronormative patriarchal viewpoint, and I want to reflect…an agenda that centers on sexual liberation, rather than sexual assimilation.

Manna uses images of the nude male body, the highly idealized form found in Greco-Roman classical art, Renaissance religious paintings and sculptures, and sexual images. While O’Reilly incorporated mid-century soft-core gay erotica such as “fitness magazines” alongside art historical references and self-portraiture, Manna utilizes their contemporary version, commercial pornography. Beyond their overtly graphic sexual imagery lies a profound significance rooted in a visual history highly recognizable to gay men, one that spans millennia, from Greco-Roman statuary to contemporary photography. These images deny the misconception that the world has always adhered to heteronormative standards, and that queerness is merely a recent "fad."

This project is an exploration of scale and impact. Manna used their Material Needs Grant to purchase a wide-format printer for the works you see here. Each photomontage is constructed through analog means–blades, paper, and adhesive–and then re-photographed and stitched together in Photoshop to construct the whole image, which is then printed at large scale.

The wide-format printer empowers Manna to transcend the confines of analog collage. By re-photographing and enlarging these compositions, they not only expand the physical dimensions of the work, but also aim to immerse viewers in an intimate engagement with the vivid content.

For sales inquiries, please contact the galleries at sue@artsworcester.org or call (508) 755-5142.