PEEP SHOW
I’m JC, UK based Visual Artist, and this is my Personal Project Peep Show. As a queer teenager coming of age in the 80s amidst the AIDS pandemic, I lived under a constant state of being watched. Being queer made you infectious in the eyes of others. Your queerness could isolate you from your family, it could get you beaten up at school, or turn you into a pariah in your own community.
Most queer people chose not to disclose their identity, hiding behind the straight-acting behaviour that society requested of us in order to ‘tolerate’ our existence. Years later, the Don’t ask don’t tell policy was introduced in the US armed forces and was replicated in the rest of the American continent as the de-facto politically-correct way of being a good queer.
Three decades later, when a different pandemic hit the planet, a new form of being watched emerged. Our interactions with other humans were moved online, and we were forced to open up the intimacy of our private spaces on apps such as Zoom.
Peep Show explores the feeling of constantly being watched and how our safe spaces are constantly being redefined. For queer people, having a safe space where you can be yourself, where you can allow yourself to feel vulnerable and freely express your identity, is necessary for our mental health and the natural exploration of the self.
How do you feel when you are put on the spotlight? How do you survive when you live in constant fear of being ousted? How can you have a healthy relationship with your own identity if you risk loosing your family, your physical integrity or your life?
I explored this concept using the Evil Eye, a superstitious belief of Greek origin but widely spread throughout the Mediterranean and West Asia, in which a potent glare is capable of inflicting harm.
The blue eye amulet is meant to protect you from the course, but how many amulets does a queer person need to protect us from the glare of a systemically discriminatory society.
The session was photographed via Zoom while Darren, the model, lived in Los Angeles and I lived in London.
