UNABASHED RELICS: Process as a form of intimacy
- jacob grant
- 5 hours ago
- 8 min read
Throughout the beginning half of this year, I began work curating an exhibition at Revelry Boutique + Gallery specifically intended to highlight artists from the LGBTQ+ community. As a retail gallery, Revelry presents local and regional artists through a market-driven platform, balancing exhibitions that resonate with Louisville audiences while remaining accessible to visitors passing through one of the city's busiest neighborhoods. Within that framework, exhibitions centered explicitly on queer experience remain surprisingly uncommon. Louisville is a progressive city situated within a politically conservative state, and opportunities for sustained public conversations around queerness are often limited to their own echo chambers. As both a curator and an artist who grew up within this community, it felt necessary to develop an exhibition that approached queer experience without apology or dilution.
The result was UNABASHED RELICS: Queer Intimacies from the Art of Alex Blom & Jack Manion. Rather than presenting male queerness as a singular identity or political statement, the exhibition considered intimacy through artistic labor itself. The works ask what happens when care, desire, memory, and devotion are not only represented in an image, but become inseparable from the process of making it.
Whenever identity becomes the subject of an exhibition, there is a careful balance to strike. It is easy to slip into celebration alone, just as it is easy to focus exclusively on trauma and tragedy. Neither approach captures the complexity of queer life. Queerness is not simply optimism nor perpetual struggle; it is lived through relationships, private rituals, performances of self, moments of longing, and acts of resilience that often leave traces rather than declarations.
Many contemporary artists have explored these tensions by allowing the artistic process itself to become a vehicle for queer intimacy. Rather than depicting identity outright, they embed it within the physical labor of making. Stephen Irwin (1959–2010), for example, was a central figure within Louisville's artistic community whose work has profoundly shaped the way I think about artistic process as a form of meaning. His art meditates on perversion and chastity, decay, and the quiet beauty hidden within banal or taboo imagery. Working with vintage pornographic magazines, Irwin meticulously scrubbed away their printed surfaces with steel wool until the explicit image dissolved into ghostly fragments. What remained was no longer pornography but an elegiac meditation on memory, desire, and consumption. Through removal rather than addition, intimacy emerges as something fragile and ephemeral—a trace rather than a spectacle.
This tension recurs throughout Irwin's practice. When I encountered his thirty-one-part series Skin Diary (2004) at the Speed Art Museum in 2024, I was struck by the way the work records the body through process rather than representation. Created following his open-heart surgery, each sheet documents the shifting colors of bruises and scars as they healed, layering deep reds, yellow ochres, greens, and violets into quiet abstractions. Rather than illustrating the body directly, Skin Diary transforms healing itself into a material record. The labor of making becomes inseparable from the experience being remembered, allowing the process to function as an archive of vulnerability.
Irwin’s work helped crystallize a question that remained with me while developing UNABASHED RELICS: what if queer intimacy is not only found in what an artwork depicts, but in the methods through which it comes into being?
I was interested in artists who emphasized their process alongside the culmination of an image. Manion, who is a Covington, KY based Artist and Teacher, creates figural drawings taken from public and personal images in his technique of “paper-cut illustration.” Rather than relying solely on drawing, Manion builds his figures through carefully layered sheets of paper, allowing subtle shadows to create depth before refining each composition with colored pencil. The resulting works possess a sculptural quality, where every cut, layer, and mark remains visible as evidence of the artist's hand. Rendered in vivid monochromatic palettes as a subtle gesture of hanky code, the figures are presented as posed, curated characters.
Some of the images are borrowed from social media pages– spaces where pictures are carefully chosen and shared to a wider network. Works such as James (2025) capture the carefully performed allure that often characterizes queer self-presentation online. Rendered almost entirely through variations of red—from deep crimson flesh tones to the saturated hues of the figure's clothing and the pale pink of a tank top lifted over his head—the composition heightens both sensuality and theatricality. It is a figure we instead choose to view as an artwork and spend time with it, rather than scroll past as internet consumers. By reconstructing them through an intentionally laborious process, he slows the speed at which digital images are ordinarily consumed. The time embedded in each cut and layer transforms fleeting online encounters into intimate objects, asking viewers to consider not only how queer identities are presented, but how they are patiently observed, remembered, and remade.
Manion’s alienation of the intimate is further expressed through the time and consideration it takes to build one’s own appearance in this sort of mating ritual of attraction. Subtleties of haircuts, tattoo placements, variations in clothing (or undressing), become languages of the intimate persona. Yellow 4 is among several pieces where grooming, self-presentation, treating the mundane rituals of shaving, styling, and dressing not as vanity but as performances of identity and desire. In these quiet moments of preparation, intimacy is found less in grand gestures than in the repetitive acts through which we compose ourselves for the gaze of others. Men at Work in Purple and Blue (2026) was a primarily attractive piece for audiences because of its unique approach to the masculine white-collar figure. Rather than borrowing images to create this scene, Manion poses as each of the four individuals. Each man is represented in a state of unclothing: trousers are removed, falling, or dragged at ankles, revealing jock straps, ties are loosened, and sock garters become cheeky features. Although each figure is modeled from his own body, they resist becoming self-portraits. Instead, his body becomes a formal device through which multiple identities emerge. The artist is simultaneously present and absent—his physical likeness remains, while any singular autobiographical reading dissolves into a broader meditation on queer masculinity and performance.
Manion’s work represents an intimacy before desire: Attraction is negotiated through carefully composed images, where identity is performed through grooming, clothing, gesture, and the slow accumulation of paper. Alex Blom's work, however, begins from a far more personal place. Rather than examining the performance that precedes intimacy, Blom turns toward intimacy already lived.
Prior to our collaboration, I had become familiar with his earlier BA work where he connected his religious background to his sexual orientation and queer identity through interdisciplinary means. In particular, his sculptures and installations such as Throne/Frociaggine (2024) and his textile works like Untitled Votive I (2024) were pieces that piqued my interest. It is relatively common for queer people to struggle with their religious affiliation or question the relativity of God in their creative pursuits, and this is something I completely identify with. However, when meeting at his SAIC MFA Studio to discuss the pieces that would be compelling for this show, I was more drawn to the meaning of making in his work. While the religious pieces drew a thematic line between religious fetish objects and sexual desire, I found his work depicting intimacy of his partner and himself to be unique to this show’s central inquiry.
Throughout the exhibition, Blom presented works across four printmaking processes—dye sublimation, silkscreen monoprint, and soft-ground etching—while incorporating motifs of beading and stitching, elements that have remained present throughout his broader studio practice. Rather than functioning as decorative additions, these repeated acts of making extend the language of the print itself, allowing each work to carry visible traces of labor and touch. For Blom, intimacy is exchanged across bodies, distance, and memory. Much of his recent work reflects the experience of maintaining a long-distance relationship, where touch becomes something remembered rather than continuously experienced. Gestures, an embrace, the contours of a body become sites of recollection, transformed through printmaking into physical objects that preserve moments otherwise separated by geography and time.
This is perhaps most evident in the series self portrait with lucas (2026). Rather than reproducing the garments through a wax casting process, this series of 6 prints begin with the garments worn by Blom and his partner themselves. Each article of clothing is run through an etching press onto a copper plate coated with soft ground, a pliable etching surface that readily accepts impressions from physical contact. Under the immense pressure of the press, the subtle textures of stitch, knit, weave, and drape are transferred directly from the fabric into the soft ground. The plate is then submerged in ferric chloride, permanently etching these impressions into the copper. After etching, the artist cuts each plate from its original rectangular form into the silhouette of the garment using a jeweler's saw before inking and printing the image. The soft ground, prized for its ability to capture the subtle textures of fabric, records every wrinkle, fold, and crease left by the absent body. What might otherwise remain an ordinary shirt or pair of pants becomes an index of presence; A material record of two people whose intimacy must often exist across distance.
To achieve the after-intimate nature of remembering, Blom moves into the dye sublimation, silkscreen monoprint. In several pieces from his 2026 series Afterimage, he begins with Polaroid photographs taken privately between himself and his partner before translating them into textile monoprints. The process resists mechanical reproduction: no two impressions can ever be exactly alike. Instead, each print bears the subtle irregularities of pressure, ink transfer, and fabric, allowing every work to exist as a singular object rather than a duplicate of a photograph. Some of these images reveal while others conceal. Afterimage XI presents the figure with relative clarity, preserving the recognizable contours of the body, while afterimage V dissolves into abstraction, leaving only fragments of form and color. Together, the works suggest that memory is never fixed or complete. In some pieces, such as afterimage III, kaketsugi stitches (traditional Japanese art of invisible mending used to repair holes and tears in clothing) are incorporated to literally fill in spaces where the memory of details become spotty.
Likewise, the dye sublimation works from Thresholds extend this language of kaketsugi alongside beaded embellishments. These images represent the intimate through fringed textiles, allowing the viewer to spend time trying to piece together the photo and understand its representation. These gestures elevate intimate memories into something resembling a reliquary, where ordinary materials become vessels for preserving affectio
n, distance, and devotion. Rather than repairing or distorting fabric alone, Blom's interventions suggest that memory itself is an ongoing act of care.
What UNABASHED RELICS ultimately seeks to reveal is that queer intimacy exists both before and after the intimate act itself. It is found in the rituals of attraction and self-presentation, but equally in memory, repair, and the objects we preserve once bodies are apart. Across both artists' practices, process becomes the means through which these experiences are given material form. Presenting this project in Louisville carried its own significance. In a city where conversations around queer experience often remain fragmented or understated, the exhibition sought to create space for a quieter, more nuanced dialogue. Rather than framing queerness through political rhetoric or identity alone, the show invited a broad audience to encounter it through the universal languages of labor, care, memory, and devotion. By foregrounding the artistic process, UNABASHED RELICS is a title that represents the overt identity ploys of the show, while treating the intimate as an archival object. This show offered
intimacy not as something to be explained, but as something to be experienced through the act of looking, preserving, and displaying.
Works Cited:
"BIG Experiments". Kristen Necessary. 8 June 2015.
Walleston, Aimme. "Dark Star: Stephen Irwin (1959–2010)", The Brooklyn Rail, March 2011, accessed July 24, 2026.
Jones, Lee, and Audrey Girouard. "Patching textiles: Insights from visible mending educators on wearability, extending the life of our clothes, and teaching tangible crafts." Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Creativity and Cognition. 2021.