Artist Statement:
Through fragmenting, obscuring, layering, reassembling, and re-photographing, artist, Pacifico
Silano recontextualizes gay erotica from the post-Stonewall Riots through the height of the AIDS crisis. He removes the source material’s overt explicit content, instead focusing in on the background of centerfolds, creating quiet portraits of fragmented bodies, inanimate objects and landscapes. These new pictures within pictures are silent witnesses that allude to absence and presence. They are stand-in memorials for not only the models who are missing but for those who originally consumed their image.
These representations of gay life, widely distributed through cheaply produced magazines are now markers of innumerable loss. With our relationship to the past constantly evolving, the definitions of these images are not fixed, they’re constantly in flux. Each new photograph considers complex issues and quiet meditations on identity, queer melancholy and our evolving relationship to the archive.

Artist Bio:
The artist most recently had a solo show open in Italy at the gallery Monti8. He has had numerous
other solo exhibitions over the past decade including at The Bronx Museum of The Arts, The Houston Center for Photography, Light Work, Baxter Street CCNY, Melanie Flood Projects, Stellar Projects, Rubber-Factory & Fragment Gallery in Moscow, Russia.
Selected Group exhibitions include A Trillion Sunsets: A Century of Image Overload, Curated by David Campany, at The International Center For Photography, Fantasy America, Curated by Jose Diaz at The Andy Warhol Museum, reGeneration4: The Challenges for Photography and its Museum of Tomorrow, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, CH, Divina Comedia, Curated by Pedro Slim, Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, MX and Art AIDS America at The Bronx Museum of The Arts.
Silano’s ambitious accordion book “I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine,” published by Loose Joints, was shortlisted for the The Paris Photo / Aperture Foundation 2021 First Book Prize & The Rencontres d’Arles Book Award for Artist Book of the Year. It was included in Time Magazine's Best Photobooks of the year. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.