Torn Porn Rips Out Pages From Our Past

Just before they became estranged, Pacifico Silano’s father gave him a box stuffed with documents and scraps. Buried within the clutter was a Polaroid of his uncle Frank, who died of AIDS-related complications when Silano was three years old. Throughout his childhood Silano had picked up on fragments of his uncle’s story, but the sense of loss he experienced looking at the Polaroid urged the artist to uncover a deeper understanding of this mysterious figure.

Tear Sheets, which opens December 10 at The Camera Club, orbits around this sense of discovery. The 15 photographs of images appropriated from vintage gay porn magazines reflect a pre-AIDS landscape. Among the naked bodies, Bette Midler can be seen holding court in bathhouse ads. “These are people he probably listened to, men he was probably attracted to, bars or bathhouses that he might’ve frequented,” says Silano, 29, who created the series during his Camera Club residency. “I have a very personal entry into the work, but I try not to make the work sentimental.”

Silano’s art has also put him in touch with his uncle’s friends and lovers. Through these serendipitous meetings he discovered that the Petco near Union Square where he adopted his dog was formerly a gay club where his uncle danced on Friday nights. Boots & Saddle, where Silano has created performance art, was his uncle’s favorite bar. He even visited the outside of his uncle’s former apartment in Boerum Hill; the space was for rent, but he lost the nerve to schedule an appointment. “There was no way I could book a tour to see a $4,000-a-month apartment,” he says. “They would’ve laughed me out of there.”

Tear Sheets is also a nod to Richard Prince, an artist from The Pictures Generation—artists known for their appropriation of images from magazines in the 1970s—who got his start in the tear sheet department at Time. “I don’t see a queer voice in [The Pictures Generation],” says Silano. “But I respond to it. So for me it’s about kind of inserting our identity in the history of art.”

More literally, his process involves tearing sheets. Issues of Honcho and Blueboy that he sources on eBay arrive at his Brooklyn apartment in various states—“Girl, pages are stuck together. I’m like, where are my gloves?”—but Silano finds the process almost spiritual. “It’s the closest I come to working with the afterlife. I’m literally going through pages of dead men. I’m selecting what to hold onto and what to let go of.”