Dean Sameshima (B. 1971)

'Dean Sameshima belongs to a current generation of photographs who combine sexy conceptualism with frottage politics—using in particular appropriation and seriality—in order to explore sexual desire and underground culture. As much informed by the West Coast photographic practice of John Baldessari and Catherin Opie as by the provocative writings of Michel Foucault and Ronald Camus, Sameshima sidesteps the modernist reverence for originality and flouts puritanical dogma by asserting a specifically queer way of borrowing and re-presenting images...In his first UK solo show at Alison Jacques Gallery in 2004 which referred to John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw, 1977—a book that recounted the author’s three-day sex binge in LA—Sameshima presented two groups of works further continuing his interest in the notion of a specifically gay sexual dialect. In the first series entitled Deaf Dude, the voice’s obliteration in the deaf guy echo the interesting paradox in which the mainstream gay culture has come into widespread social acceptance while the queer outsider gets silenced—a silence multiplied by re-photographing the image of a deaf gay man from an 80s softcore porn magazine. While a certain melancholia is apparent in the subject matter, his use of sign language for homosexual purposes (signs include ‘asshole’ and ‘blowjob’) is a glorious indication of possible resistance to normative behaviour and surveillance’
(Y.B., ‘Dean Sameshima’, in LA Artland: Contemporary Art from Los Angeles, 2005, reproduced at https://www.peresprojects.com/press-kit/DS-LA%20Artland-2005.pdf).