BasketShop Gallery presents the work of Chivas Clem in participation with the Fotofocus 2018 Biennial: Open Archive. After more than a decade living in New York, where he garnered international esteem as a multi-media artist, Clem moved back to his hometown of Paris, Texas. While documenting a bookstore in the small town, he befriended many of the transient men residing there and started to form an emotional bond with them. He describes them as “…drifting through life on the fringes. They represent a kind of rugged masculinity that is connected to the myths of the American West—but what were once ‘cowboys’ have mutated into ‘rednecks’—used in the pejorative to describe a certain kind of hyper-masculine terror. It connotes racism and homophobia: a scene of jacked-up trucks covered in confederate flags.” Clem says, “I grew up gay in this place—small town, deep south—and these were the kinds of men that made my life miserable. Now they are the only people I relate to, as they are outsiders themselves. I can now reconcile the twin feelings of desire and fear that gave them so much psychic power in my youth.”

Clem’s focus is on documenting the environment around this maligned subgroup of Americans—disenfranchised, heterosexual, white men. Through their own hubris, they have had to sustain a type of social armor from a heritage that is too complex to serve them. Clem’s photography searches beyond the guarding that these men endure and adorns them with an intimate portrayal of their frailties.

FotoFocus Biennial 2018 spans 70 museums and galleries across Greater Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, Dayton and Columbus, Ohio, featuring over 200 artists, curators, and educators. Each Biennial is structured around a unifying theme; for 2018 that theme is Open Archive.

Open Archive emphasizes the centrality of photography and lens-based art to modernism, and it examines our fundamental need to preserve photographs and to tell stories through their collection, organization, and interpretation.

*Support for this FotoFocus Biennial 2018 exhibition was provided by FotoFocus*