Rory Hamovit is an artist currently based between Los Angeles, California, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. With an MFA in photography from Yale School of Art (2020), Hamovit’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. With his staged, often surreal images, he explores concepts of masculinity, play, and queer corporeality. He describes his crafted scenes, which feature handmade objects and sets, as “mimicry of our under-examined world.” Of his recent series, “Parallel Play,” he says:
“My natural intuition, preternatural even, is to anthropomorphize everything I see, to give each object a soul and voice, to consider them a friend until they can be proven to be a foe. There is thought about the plane on which souls exist, one different than the conscious dimension in view daily. There are glimpses of alternate dimensions, of course, through telescopes, microscopes, refractions of lights, and in mirrors and shadows. These are the elements of the lens. My photography is formed by tradition and by imagining what new can come from tradition. My imagination is my friend and foe because it expands my universe but can hinder it, too. It has deformed reality, reshaped it, distinguished it. The plane of souls is colorless, grayscale, historic, even at times noir. The parallel world created by lens, light, and shadow remains, as ever, black-and-white.”
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