A review of Evergon's exhibition "Ram Boys" at his Montreal studio; part of the "Le Mois De La Photo à Montréal" festival of photography.

Evergon produces very large format polaroid photographs which necessitates a very narrow depth of field and, typically, use of an artificial interior stage. He creates a larger than life sized yet compressed and flattened space in which he squashes obviously fabricated vignettes of people and props.

Comrades In Camp includes a metal lunch pail, red and black patterned velvet drapery, a fake snake, a fake monkey, and four sexy young men. The men are wearing baby oil, black Doc Martin boots with red socks and laces, and very little else except one who dons a ram's horn helmet and another minimally clad in a loincloth made from a plastic garbage bag. Despite the flippant use of contemporary materials, the overall composition is very much appropriated from neoclassical painting and the subject matter shares the 19th century's fascination with the exotic. The initial effect of the composition on me is serene, romantic, stoic if you will - but then I look again. While the four men, two seated and two standing, do not cross the bounds of common decency, the two seated men cruise me eye-to-eye with what I recognize immediately as pornographic expressions. Directed at me, their expressions were undoubtedly homoerotic; these men are as gay as I am - as proof I can only assert that it takes one to know one (a phenomenon otherwise known as gaydar). I identified the props, the ram's horn helmet refers to the same mythology as the Dodge Ram: the unbridled all natural maleness butting up against itself. The worker boots and lunch pail refer to the macho manual worker type. The Doc Martin's brand in particular have been adopted by skinheads as an icon for themselves, then appropriated by lesbians and gays as an ironic icon-bending statement. The snake needs no explanation, except to add that the way it is entangled refers to, appropriates, and offers a homoerotic reading of Michelangelo's Lazarus and His Sons. The stuffed monkey, thrown in effectively for good measure, informs me that ironic humour is at play here, in case I hadn't already noticed.

Nightwatch II is somewhat more sexually explicit. One ramboy is riding the other piggybum (as opposed to piggyback). Both are stark naked except for ram horn headdresses and Doc Martin's. Anatomically they could be fucking. One bamboo and one machine made post are typically phallic in the context. Like Comrades in Camp, the stage they stand on is made of no-frills plywood. The lighting is subdued and the skin is silky. While the above description could easily be of a centrefold in a wank-mag, but as the title suggests, it's formal composition is romantic and painterly, the silky drapery is classical, the size and colour are awe-inspiring. Aesthetic beauty and ironic gay humour are artfully combined in a bowl of serious politics, and the mixture is explosive. What both Nightwatch II and Comrades In Camp eventually make apparent to me is that the traditional aesthetic conventions by which I am initially and so effectively taken are mere constructions - while the beautiful gay bodies which I initially dismiss as porn, are very real people.

The studio space in which RAMBOYS was presented was a barrier to my involvement with the work. The space very much upheld the conventions of a modern gallery, complete with clinical white walls and flood lighting. The absence of furniture forced me to sit on the floor. Perhaps by reason it has something to do with what many collectors and critics still expect of a site for high art. Drapery over the windows and a few plants in a corner might have been an attempt at creating a more human space, but were actually less successful than a suggestive bulge in the floorboards at doing so. It was despite the white noise of the annoyingly anti-sexual and anti-subject aesthetic of the decor that I could engage with Evergon's sensuous work.

Before entering the RAMBOYS exhibition I was already aware that Evergon has received a good deal more attention since I first wrote about his work for Epicene in 1987. One of his RAMBOYS works Captain I was chosen to represent the entire festival on the cover of its catalogue and for its posters. Like Pierre et Gilles, Maplethorpe, and many others, Evergon is strong voice in a chorus of contemporary gay artists who significantly transcend the dominant ideologies and established high art modes of our time. They are fortunate to have the support of an emerging influential class of homo-positive viewers, reviewers, and patrons (such as Polaroid), who are notably more liberating than those they supplant.

Whether or not Evergon's work is helping the cause of homosexual emancipation will be for history to decide. I am happy to see a contemporary aesthetics of homosexuality invented, and its iconography addressed and visible. While for many the content of Evergon's highly aesthetic work may incense their moral sensibilities, for me it is personally elating and empowering. The ironies he recognizes, his juxtaposition of serious art history and traditional aesthetics with contemporary gay erotica, and his fertile sense of beauty mixed with camp humour, all situate Evergon's work close to my heart.