Dillon Chapman

A portrait of the artist’s brother taken with a digital camera, printed on a transparency sheet, and then printed on fiber paper through three different alternative processes: van dyke brown, cyanotype, and gum bichromate.

A series of photographs shot on black and white polaroid film in collaboration with K.E. Nickell.

A series of color polaroids of the genitals of various men that I met through the gay hookup app Grindr (and one of my own). A bag filled with oranges is typically referred to as a “pocket” of oranges.

An ephemeral sculpture made of orange peels, thread, and a needle. The sculpture is survived by various photographs, including a color polaroid in which I hold the uterine sculpture in front of where my own womb would be.

Images from my family photo albums that were originally shot with color film by various family members that have been reprinted through black and white analog film processes on silver gelatin paper.

The images focus on the various women in my family, tracing a matrilineal history.

Study for a larger archival project.

An installation of polaroids made in concert with my immediate community. Based on a short series of photographs by Gillian Wearing titled “Take Your Top Off” in which she photographed herself topless with trans women, I inverted this by inviting people back to my studio where I took my top off and posed in front of a red velvet curtain, facing away from the camera. The polaroid was set on a tripod so that each person pressing the shutter made the same photograph, producing 33 nearly identical images. A single photograph was taken accidentally when setting up the system and shows my breasts, a nod to the Wearing’s original project.

From 2019 to 2020, I lived in an historic house in the queer neighborhood of Hillcrest in San Diego that is a nexus of queer energy. This house served as the San Diego AIDS Project during the 80s and 90s, as the Queer Jewish Center in the 2000s, and finally as the Hillcrest Youth Center until the early 2010s. It is now private property, owned and leased by a property management company, yet the queer legacy of the space lives on. The majority of the inhabitants have been and still are queer, trans, and gender expansive people. Somewhat like a queer sorority house, it has eight bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, two living rooms, a tiny kitchen, and a fabulous back porch that overlooks the flower shop next door. At a given time seven to eight roommates live there simultaneously. Rather than approach this series of photographs as a traditional documentary project, I mostly created images of existing images in and around the house: traces of previous residents. Alongside this I began photographing myself in the space as a way to insinuate myself and complicate ideas of documentary. This was heavily inspired by the photographic works of both Zackary Drucker and Zoe Leonard, two artists who have had a lasting impact on my practice as an artist. During my time there I wrote extensively and included in the book version of this project are several poems about the space and my mental state while living in the Hillcrest House.

An ongoing series of color polaroids in which I have re-photographed nudes by notable queer male photographers, cropping in on the faces to transform them from nudes into portraits. All of the images are photographed on my computer screen, which distorts the image and prevents the polaroid camera from focusing, creating this pre-Raphaelite haze. Rather than an archive which seeks to preserve, this project functions as an index, a reference point for queer male photography.

In this first iteration of my strange fruit (for you) (2023), eight unique polaroid prints of citrus fruit (lemons, oranges, grapefruits) in various stages of development and/or desiccation are left out in the sun to “rot.” Placed on the ground and directly facing the sun, over time the images will slowly, almost imperceptibly fade until the polaroids are illegible. This explores the dual nature of the polaroid as both image and object, while serving as an homage to Zoe Leonard’s installation strange fruit (for David) (1992-1997), in which she stitched fruit peels back together and they are allowed to slowly decompose in whatever art space they are installed. Leonard’s work deals with loss around the AIDS crisis, including her friend David Wojnarowicz. My own installation marks a return to materials first explored at the beginning of my artistic career, in which I would stitch orange peels into the shape of my own barren (nonexistent) womb and document via polaroid prints, or gently place the skins of oranges back onto flesh through the magic of video. my strange fruit (for you) is an exercise in mourning a deep, cultural wound for queer, trans, and gender expansive people, who turn to disappearing archives in a moment in which there are, again, attempts at erasing us from history, memory, and public life.

In subject/object, artist Dillon Chapman explores the legacy of duality surrounding transfeminine creatives in the history of visual culture. Each of the subjects, Candy Darling, Greer Lankton, Zackary Drucker, and Chapman herself, are artists in their own right, and lend their image to their own projects or the artistic pursuits of others. SRO is the unofficial dollhouse of San Diego - in this small suite of polaroids, Chapman rephotographs images of the subjects and presents a brief and incomplete history of doll makers.