Dean Jones

Veiled Encounters considers contemporary queer experience through an encounter with vintage gay pornography from the 1970s and 1980s. The images function not simply as sources of erotic imagery, but as fragments of a visual history of queer desire. Although the period represented falls outside Jones’s own lived experience, its images and histories continue to shape the cultural landscape in which contemporary queer identities are understood. Drawn to the intimacy, physicality and particular visual language of these representations, Jones considers what it means to inherit a queer history without having lived it.

The work begins with an extended process of searching and selecting from this archive. Through drawing, embossing and the incorporation of found vintage textiles, photographic imagery is translated into a slower, materially intensive form. Sustained attention to bodies, gestures and encounters allows relationships of intimacy, vulnerability, agency and power within the source material to be reconsidered. The physical processes of drawing and embossing also introduce touch and sensation into the work, extending the erotic beyond the depicted body and into the act of making itself.

Care is embedded within both the subject and process of the work. Rather than reproducing the images solely through their original pornographic function, Jones’s sustained engagement creates a different mode of looking, one based on attention, interpretation and material encounter. The resulting works occupy a space between the pornographic and the erotic, asking how representations of queer bodies can acquire new meanings when encountered through care, personal experience and the passage of time.

This encounter continues through the installation, where lace moves between the surface of the drawings and the surrounding gallery space. Embossed textiles within the paper are echoed by lace curtains installed across the walls, making the fabric an extension of the work rather than a neutral backdrop. Its associations with domesticity, softness and protection create a shifting threshold between concealment and exposure, recalling the movement between private and public that surrounds queer sexuality. Through the relationship between image, material and space, Veiled Encounters brings a historical archive of queer desire into the present, creating an encounter between bodies and histories separated by time but connected through desire.