HUGO FERNANDES
Hugo Fernandes is an American-born photographer. He received his BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in 2007, but has been experimenting with photography since he was 14 years old. Hugo has spent five years developing this project, photographing mainly in New York but also in Portugal and Canada. In the process, he has exhibited selections from it in various group shows. Hugo’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including at Aperture, Visual Arts Gallery and Gallery San Ludovico. His work has been publish in Abercrombie and Fitch’s Quarterly: Return to Paradise, OUT Magazine, Starved Magazine and ETA.

Artist’s Statement:
Intimate Strangers is a series of photographs about momentary intimacy between anonymous men. The classic portrait encounter between artist and subject is modified to incorporate the protocol of internet sex hookups. After meeting online, one man arrives at the other’s place, but the usual outcome of anonymous sex is suspended, replaced instead by a shared contemplative act: the photographing of one by the other in an atmosphere of heightened vulnerability. A large-format photographic portrait session occurs, portraying the disrobed subject in a moment that is both foreign and familiar, the photographer and subject brought together by a shared bond: their sexuality, and a desire to explore it through a creative act.   The resulting images eschew the usual tropes of still photography about gay male sexuality; the explicit, frontal, trophy nudity of that genre is replaced by a cinematic and atmospheric approach that uses real locations and low light to create a mood that is nuanced and ambiguous, melancholic yet seductive, tense but intimate.

JOY SCOPA
Born in Boston, MA to a bricklayer and terminally ill mother who used art as a way to heal. Joy Scopa is an artist obsessed with the past and how it manifests itself in her day-to-day life. She loves drawing on the awkward, strange, humorous and heartbreaking experiences that comprise her youth. Earning her BA in Media Studies and Visual Arts at Fordham University in New York she then went on to attend the Miami Ad School where she studied graphic design and photography. She is currently in her second year of the MFA in graphic design program at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles..

Artist’s Statement:
As an artist I am fixated on the past. The awkward, the traumatic, the private, the heartbreaking, the humorous, and the humiliating memories of my childhood manifest themselves in my work. Before I hit my fat kid phase I was a tomboy. When I was six I used to dress up in my brothers football uniform and pose for Polaroids with my arms flexed as the jersey and helmut basically wore me. Other days I’d stand in front of the mirror and shove socks down my underwear to get a glimpse of myself as a dude. Once I wore the football uniform to a Halloween dance, I can still hear Tony Castinino giving me shit about how he didn’t know girls could be football players. For some reason I didn’t care but this marked the first time I was made aware of societies expectations and definitions of gender roles.

In my current project, Getting The Girl, I have focused on key movies from my childhood, in which the lead male role left an imprint of himself on me. I’ve isolated particular scenes that resonate with me most. Scenes that are eerily familiar and sometimes made me feel like I was staring in a mirror or watching myself on the screen. This observation lead me to question what gender really means, where it comes from and how we ultimately “learn” or model ourselves after particular male and female roles. I quickly began to realize that I had in some respects “become” the leading man. Throughout the films I caught glimpses of mannerisms, gestures, facial expressions, clothing and in some cases, attitude and outlook that resembled my own behaviors. They had literally actualized themselves into my being. They taught me how to dress, how to balance being sweet with a little dickhead swagger, how to be the geek and still be cool, how to make a girl swoon, how to be thoughtful and protective, how to be the hero, the guy that all the girls daydream about; their own personal Jake Ryan, John Bender, and Dallas Winston. Ultimately, they taught me how to Get the Girl.

About the Curator, Cora Lambert
Cora Lambert graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2007 and began curating exhibitions between New York and California. Cora has worked with Umbrage Editions, the Advocate and Gochis Galleries, Velvet Park Media and now serves on the Board of Directors at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art.