Romario’s Work

Porn Portrait

Homosexual sexuality and pleasure is a topic I personally enjoy exploring in my artwork. Not only because of my own sexuality, but also because I enjoy numbing my viewers mind to erotic imagery. I’ve worked with gay erotica images for so long now that I barely recognize it as porn anymore. For this conceptual portrait I took 81 screenshots of gay porn scenes and zoomed in so much on each until the image a completely lost and it becomes abstract. I placed all 81 images in a tile grid format and repeated it until I ended up with an image of 6561 squares of gay porn.

Yes, I did zoom in on some highly sexual areas such as the assholes and dicks, but I also zoom in on parts of the image that weren’t related to porn at all, such as the blankets, eyes and windows. I found it funny that some of the images that I avoided focusing on the sexual areas ended up looking like they were. who knew a shoulder could look so much like the head of a penis? I think this speaks to how our own minds choose to see what we have taught it to through our own biases and judgments.

Ariana: Just Keep Breathing

Singing is a beautiful ability that many people have. One of my favourite singers is Ariana Grande. I’ve listened to her so much and am so familiar with the way she sings that I can anticipate the breaths that she will take while listening to any of her songs. Breath control is very important when it comes to pushing out strong vocals and many people forget that. I wanted to put a spotlight on the breaths of Ariana by cutting out all the music and lyrics out of her songs and only leaving the strongest breaths of each. I used the songs ‘Raindrops’, ‘Breathin’, ‘POV’, ‘Ghostin’, ‘Side to side’, ‘Problem’, ‘Focus’, ‘Everytime’ and ‘No tears left to cry’. In their entirety, these songs together would ask for 25 minutes of listening. However, I can give you expressions of all these songs in only 55 seconds.

Is there something on my face?

I’m used to taking selfies but I think these ones will stand out in my camera roll. It was a very new experience looking for materials around my house and asking myself, “What can fit on my head?” My personal favourite is the glasses photo. I don’t know why I have so many glasses, but I was fun to stick them in my hair and make it elongate my face. I also think it fools you a bit because it makes you question where my eyes actually are.

Adad Hannah piece

Asked my roommate Mikayla as she was coming back from her walk, what surprises her the most about Covid times currently?

Mikayla – “How dumb people are. Things could’ve been so much better for everyone if we had all gotten over our own needs and thought of the bigger picture. Even now the only time I leave the house is to walk the dog. I don’t even grocery shop really because of all the pasta I have. That’s my little rant. Can I go inside now?”

Flying Pumpkin

Pumpkin toss at Snyders Farm

Have you ever seen a pumpkin floating through the clouds? Well you have now. This photo wasn’t planned. I went to Snyders pumpkin farm with my roommates and we were just having a good day running through the pumpkin patch and eating pie. Like most people I wanted photos of myself to let everyone only know that I’m trendy and all. As my friend was taking photos of me, my other friend threw this pumpkin at me to get my scared reaction and this moment was captured. This photo is very visually pleasing to me. It could just be the complimentary colours of orange against the blue sky, but on it’s own it’s funny to see an object that we’re used to seeing growing out of the ground, sitting in the air.

Go to bed Button

For my hour of sitting still I chose to follow in our dog Button’s footsteps and lay in her bed for an hour. “Go to bed” is one of the few commands that she understands and it can be heard in my apartment several times a day. We use it to get her off the couch if company is over, if she’s being too needy while we’re trying to work or if she’s being bad. Since we tell her this so often during the day and she sleeps here, she spends many hours laying in this dog bed. So I figured me being in there for an hour couldn’t be too hard.

It was very comfy because we spoil her but I will say my legs have never been so sore. Throughout the hour I found that seeing things from her level was very strange. Being so low I couldn’t see the tops of high surfaces such as the stove or kitchen table. I also got to notice all the sounds that our apartment makes that I haven’t had the time to notice before. For example, our heater sounds like a jet engine. Button also didn’t seem impressed that I was in her bed and she’s not allowed on mine.

A Fishes Kilometer

I have a betta fish named Smirnoff. I’ve always had a soft spot for pet fish because I wanted to give them a better life than sitting in a small plastic jar in a pet store. As soon as I saw the pure white and blood red colours on this little guy I had to scoop him up and name him after a brand of vodka. When I bought this tank I really thought he was living the best life with all this space to himself. Though I couldn’t help but wonder how much space he really had and if he could walk out of this tank, how far could his water take him.

Now how does one figure out the relationship between distance and water? Maybe I’m the only one crazy enough to ask, but this is how I attempted to figure it out.

I filled up several water bottles and found a location exactly 1km away from Smirnoffs home. As I walked to that location I let the water pour out of the water bottle at a steady rate, replacing it with another when the one i was using ran out. Once I reached the location 1km away I had a measurement of the amount of water I poured out in the process. I then followed the trail of water that I had created home.

After calculating the amount of water that I poured out I discovered that I used 3.5L of water in the process, which is the exact amount of water in the tank that I have Smirnoff in. Therefore, Smirnoff lives in 1 kilometers worth of water.

Sol LeWitt

The concept of the idea of an artwork being a machine is shown in LeWitts work through his instructions for these wall drawings being the head of the body of creation. He has created a system of providing those who install the work with the guide, taking away the need for those whose hands are a part of the installation of the work. The hand of the artist is not present, all that is present from the artist is the initial idea. Much like forming a document on a computer and printing it. You didn’t physically create the document, the printer did, but the printer is not the artist, you are.