Artist Bill Travis has been creating a remarkable series of photographs entitled “Poems of the Body”: Enchantingly illuminated male subjects framed in 19th-century union cases.
At a root level, these pieces are intensely physical. They have power sexually, erotically. The men are stunning.
What I greatly admire is how this “root sexuality” begins to expand, like a drop of ink in water, swimming outwards sensually. My heart and mind become a bit affected. If I gaze long enough, it’s as though I get slightly high, consciousness shifting. I think it’s the diffusion of light that does this… the lovely way the men are blended (no, that is not right), the way they dissolve into the backgrounds which always have this diffuse-gauzy quality, the men becoming rather like god-ghosts, these beautiful and strong men simultaneously sweet and gentle spirits.
A unique kind of sensuality, transcending the sexual yet still intensely physical.
And then there are the union case frames. The Civil War era connection anchors the images; historicizes them somewhat; instills them with a kind of ancestry. Suddenly, I am seeing these men as fallen soldiers, ghosts of war, with the frames now a kind of love locket. I have been searching for an appropriate word. The locket-cases do not enshrine or memorialize, nor do they spark some act of preservation like a Medieval Reliquary. Instead: they celebrate!
The only place I know where to go to get a handle on such a celebration is Whitman. Whitman used to chew calamus, a stalky plant from swampy areas, and it’s a plant that has a of homoerotic-phallic even aphrodisiacal connotations that were not lost on Whitman. Strong men emerging erect, gentle men merging with nature, living men with history, in a union case that rather marks their death, anchoring in time.
Visit: billtravis.art and on IG @billtravisphoto
Above: Bryan (Photo transfer on mother of pearl in 19th-c. union case, 3¾x6½ in., 2021)
Below top: Ty (Photo transfer on mother of pearl in 19th-c. union case, 3¾x6½ in., 2021)
Below bottom: Samuele (Photo transfer on aluminum in 19th-c. half union case, 3¾x6½ in., 2021)
