Dallas Contemporary is pleased to present Chivas Clem: Shirttail Kin, the Paris, Texas-based multimedia artist’s first solo museum exhibition, opening October 17, 2024. Curated by Alison M. Gingeras, Shirttail Kin presents an archive of more than 70 photographs spanning over a decade. In a shift from the artist’s usual appropriation-based explorations of pop culture, Shirttail Kin documents a local community of transient men whom Clem frequented upon his return to his hometown after an illustrious career in New York. Turning his attention to his native landscape, Clem captures some of the region’s most pressing issues. His intimate images disclose complex and surprising constructions of masculinity while also capturing an empathetic picture of a misunderstood and largely forgotten population. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by the New York-based publisher Heinzfeller Nileisist and Dallas Contemporary, with a foreword by renowned cultural critic, Hilton Als.
“Dallas Contemporary is proud to present this compelling body of work from Chivas Clem. Provocative but gentle, Chivas’s photographs capture human bonds, trust, and fervent rapports between men in the same place in rural Texas, but with wildly different trajectories, portraying an America that is not as divided or fractured as we often see depicted. The work offers a loaded, poignant view of outsiderness, a position at the heart of this country’s myth,” said Interim Executive Director Lucia Simek.
After almost two decades in New York—completing the prestigious Whitney Independent Study Program and launching the artist space The Fifth International—Chivas Clem returned to his hometown of Paris, Texas, converting a dilapidated Victorian house into his studio. The move prompted Clem to encounter a community of transient men, “drifters, addicts, and former felons,” whom he hired to help in the studio. Growing close, the men became Clem’s “shirttail kin,” a colloquial term used in the South to mean one’s chosen family. After establishing a cautious familiarity spanning many years, Clem was able to fully immerse himself among this itinerant subculture, taking pictures but also deepening his personal engagement with his subjects while living alongside them. The 1,600 ensuing photographs are a jarring coupling of vulnerability and feral charisma: models nude, sleeping, having a bath, but also wielding guns or taking drugs. The result is a fraught diary that reflects upon masculinity, class, visibility, desire, trauma, and beauty.
The contradictions in Clem’s relationships with the men—as a queer artist in an environment he experienced as hostile as a child—are reflected in his nuanced portrayals of his muses and their surroundings. Clem’s lens captures a tenderness not often associated with rugged, Southern masculinity. The men’s slender, often-naked bodies are seen lounging dreamily by a large window, cigarette in hand, and floating in milky bathwater. Other portraits show the men gazing despairingly into the camera or sporting a shy smile while embracing a bouquet of wildflowers.
While these posed and unplanned images are imbued with a clear homoerotic tension, they also vitally capture many of the pressing concerns of the region: the erosion of the cowboy archetype, the marginalization of the white, rural working class, the effects of the carceral industrial complex, and the ongoing epidemic of drug use across the American landscape. The gentle portraits of the men are taken against a backdrop of rural decay: the chipping paint and plaster of Clem’s studio, collapsing houses, eerie, deserted gas stations.
Like the queer pioneers that have preceded him, Clem takes up the mantle of writer and political activist Jean Genet, who was able to penetrate normally unseeable worlds. Shirttail Kin also traces the artist’s personal arc, reflecting Clem’s own complex and amorphous relationship with his hometown. The result is a subtle and generous look at a region and population that are not often considered with intelligent focus—not in Texas’ cultural circles nor across the country—portrayed with nuance, empathy, and a startling candor.
“It felt necessary to engage with a Texan artist and to recenter ourselves in the community,” said Adjunct Curator Alison M. Gingeras. “The story reflected in these photographs—of Chivas’s rediscovery of his home and reinvention of himself in a place where he was made to be an outcast—is extremely resonant. We hear the term ‘white working class’ constantly in our political discourse as if this disaffected and neglected population is a monolith. Yet the images that make up Shirttail Kin deconstruct that notion. What emerges is complexity, endearment, and radical empathy—attitudes we desperately need in our cultural and political landscape.”