Look at me as if I loved me – the queer community on display

Non it is a coincidence that Look at me like you love me – look at me as if I loved methe exhibition of Jess T. Dugan inauguration on May 17, in fact it is Linternational day against homophobia, bifia, transphobia. For more than twenty years it has been celebrated on this day since in 1990 the WHO (World Health Organization), with serious and guilty delay, removed homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses.

The goal is to raise public awareness against all forms of discrimination and violence towards LGBTQ+ people and promote the inclusion and respect of human rights for queer people.

Galleries of Italythe Museum of Intesa Sanpaolo, in the prestigious Milan headquarters, in Piazza della Scala, hosts this courageous exhibition. Poetic and intense, profound and engaging, that I had the honor and pleasure of cure and for which I wrote this short text, over a long interview with the artist who is enclosed in the exhibition catalog published by Allesses.

Pastoral

The fresco that Jess T. Dugan composes with large -shaped images with pastel colors is an ode to love.
Look at me like you love me – look at me as if I loved me It is an exhibition that, through thirty works in which both self -portraits appear and portraits of individuals and couples, stages faces and bodies, witnesses of existences between heaven, earth and water. It is the creation, this tormented earthly paradise in which the artist represents love and love speaks with the body and bodies, explores desire, the relationship, the difficult paths of the choices.

The art of looking

Dugan exercises the art of looking, addressing the goal towards the other and towards himself, now in domestic intimacy, now in the observation of nature that everything embraces and includes.
The use of the large format retains the depth and detail of the work in balance between portrait and landscape.
The exhibition itinerary invites the encounter between the subject and the spectator in an empathic dialogue where photography becomes sentimental manifesto for an identity reflection.

Intimate journey

To complete the exhibition installation, two videos, Letter to my father of 2017 and Letter to my daughter of 2023, in which the autobiographical vocation, accompanied by the artist’s voice itself, allows us to travel in his intimate experience in which personal memory is elevated to investigation on the complexity of the feelings, relationships, transformations and scars that we have impressed within us and our bodies.

Vulnerability and grace

Look at me like you love me – look at me as if I loved me It is a continuous work that for more than ten years has engaged the artist in the desire to represent himself and the Queer and Transgender community.
It is an integral and profound vision that contemplates vulnerability and grace, strength and difficulty of being oneself, live human beings, connected to one’s desires, in relation to others, in a contemporaneity still permeated with stereotypes, prejudices and discrimination.
In the work of Jess T. Dugan, just below the surface of the images, the beauty of human diversity transpires and the echo of a powerful visual song of freedom resonates.

The exhibition:

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