'Dog Days and Giant Hands' by Julius Pristauz at Teeküche, Vienna

for maggy yolanda & miles

The pieces presented in dog days and giant hands can be seen as a culmination of experiencing queer adolescence and growing up as a millennial. Autobiographical anecdotes taken from my personal life are blending with certain pop culture references.

The show is taking advantage of hyper-acceleration in order to illustrate this humorous yet nostalgic and, also important, unapologetically gay coming of age picture. It functions as a weird and campy momentum with the content of its works spanning from free and liberated gender expression all the way to the binaries and pressures a teen is extradited to when entering the world of gay (online) dating culture.

Two important protagonists in the process of building an identity of your own are to be examined: authenticity & appropriation. What can be taken from whom and for what? Who deserves credit and owns authorship when we’re developing ideas, manners and even a whole life based off already existing material? Should we open up to appropriation in the name of creation? Partly almost working like a curator, I sought out this collection of pictures, shapes and objects. While most of them have somehow already existed in that way, they are now being re-charged and merged with new meaning.

Ultimately, they are composed of an original purpose and surrounding, an over the time internalized power of the given image, as well as of biographical details and a little bit of pure randomness. Escaping the path of a common small-town youth it was pop culture, internet phenomena and fashion that animated me to step out of my comfort zone and seek personal enlightenment and clarification through experience. This is my acknowledgement. This is what I’ve learned.

adam and adam  watching the airy phoenix in  love with darkness and into the blue singing the blues of sexuality and  all the huge hands on TV  the hymn, anthem of tall men  opinionated but no brain  watching the doves take off  birds have no nationality watching the sunrise from above  peacefully exceeding borders  losing brain cells  thanks to recreation and one last kiss  when their flesh has healed  they now call themselves  and further fly under the names of  adam and madam