Noah Fodor

Drawing from the artist’s decade-long experience of playing ice hockey, Noah Fodor’s Play Glamorous explores queer identity and the contradictions of masculinity in sport. Sports set the conditions in which men can touch and become vulnerable with one another, but when this emotional or physical closeness falls outside the pitch, it is questioned and sometimes attacked. In hockey, a particularly intense game, queerness is often denied and even feared, and the locker room can be an environment in which queer players feel they need to hide their identity. The work references performative acts such as punching, hitting, and slamming, and explores this particular version of what it means to be a man – and the paradoxes within it. 

Through self-portraiture and colour, the locker room becomes a portal that exposes the artist’s experiences of seduction, and even fear. The photographs fluctuate between reality and fantasy, ad queer possibility is made visible in a space in which it has historically been covert. Viewers encounter the artist as a potential victim, perpetrator, onlooker, and ultimately, object of desire. Born in 1999, Noah Fodor is a queer lens-based artist currently living in Chicago, whose work has been featured by Photo-Emphasis, The Darkside Collective, and Fifth Wheel Press, among others. Fodor obtained his BFA from Point Park University and his MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago.