Patrick Moskwa
he/him
Patrick Moskwa is interested in the intersection of Craft, Architecture, and Art, using his practice to investigate these connections in relation to his queer body. He is an educator, artist, architect, and creative facilitator.
“My work plays with, and at times subverts, the moments of connection that we share between bodies, human and otherwise. The work interrogates the banal, the glorious, the perverse, and the traumatic, and situates our personal experiences of place and time in conversation with each other's. I like to think our memories of a place are embedded in objects and that objects reflect those stories back out to the world.”
“My work questions the concept of a wearable safe space. It sculpts an ordinary athletic cup into a soft, flaccid, delicate, and skin-like object that was once wearable as armour, thus changing our conception of what it means to be protected by wearables. Instead, it points to the male hetero cis normative idea that his balls are his manliness and therefore any suggestion of his preciousness being affected by the ‘new (dangerous) trans agenda’ is somehow challenging his gender as well. The pile is a reference to the ‘boy's’ locker room and a pile of flesh that tantalizes and charges that space.”
How does your work relate to the theme Adorned Serenity— How does the work function as a wearable safe space?
To Protect His Precious Goods, Latex, 9inches, x 4 1/2inches x 2inches (when full), 2023
“This piece alludes to the concept of disrupting a hetero-normative safe space, thus making queer safe spaces more atmospheric. Those who challenge our spaces are made vulnerable, and for those of us to triumph by its humour. This piece is not meant for me. It is meant for everyone to consider what a safe space means once the function of a wearable is challenged. It turns a function of armour into a piece that is about its original ‘contents’.”
How do you see this piece existing in the world as a wearable safe space?
Or is this piece specific to you?
If someone found this piece and needed an instruction manual to make the safe space work — what’s a quick how to?
“This piece suggests a contradiction to a wearable safe space. Rather than having instructions for use or wear, the pieces question the wearable itself. The function of the original piece is changed into a piece that can no longer hold those notions of protection and safety it once had.”
“Latex is a material I have been working with for over 3 years. It is a material that allows me to pull a ‘skin’ or a membrane from an object, thus charging the new object with potential. Latex and leather function in kink and the queer world as an identifier of cultural subversion. Latex can also cause allergic reactions and threaten potential interaction with the elastic and tactile objects. I like the corporeal quality the latex brings to my work as a queer artist.”