AMIGXS
CAMILO GODOY

AMIGXS
CAMILO GODOY

June 3 — July 19 2021


Saturdays and Sundays between 12
and 6 pm or by appointment


Eu sempre fui pornográfico. Mas hoje sou muito mais.

(I was always pornographic. But today I am much more.)

—Hudinilson Jr.

OCDChinatown presents an exhibition of black-and-white photographs by Colombian-born artist Camilo Godoy. Eight framed prints are complemented by a new wall-size photograph, commissioned by OCDChinatown.

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Four years ago, Godoy began inviting friends and lovers to pose nude in his studio. Although inspired in part by the vintage men’s porn magazine Amigo, Godoy chose to title his project with the gender-inclusive version of the Spanish word for “friends:” AMIGXS. The artist assembled the images in three issues of an offset-printed zine. Together, they convey an omnium gatherum of physical desire across gender and racial identities, sexualities, and body types. “The photographs of AMIGXS defy racial, gender, and sexual norms,” Godoy explains. “My work is informed by queer, Latinx, feminist, and Black perspectives. My photographs celebrate friendship and insist on love as a way of life to imagine different subversive ways of being.”

Drawing on a wide range of nude portraiture—from ancient Roman sculpture to the work of queer photographers such as Peter Hujar, Hudinilson Jr., and Laura Aguilar—Godoy’s photographs reveal an attention to form that is as classical as it is contemporary. After a year spent in isolation, when the threat of contagion interrupted intimacy and proximity, these images are striking in the sheer force of their physicality: A tongue licks a beard; breasts push up against bellies; a hand gently encircles scrotum. Reclining on one arm, poet and performer Justin Allen (AMIGXS [Justin], 2019) confidently locks gazes with the viewer. Artist and writer Mike Funk (AMIGXS [Mike], 2017) smiles as he flexes his biceps and arcs his body, in a playful take on a beefcake pose.

Dominating the space is the larger-than-life odalisque AMIGXS (Sammy), 2021. The subject of the image, Sammy Kim, is an artist and sex worker active in New York’s QTBIPOC community. In April, they co-organized the gathering “Protect Asian Lives” with the collectives Bubble_T and Papi Juice, and other groups, in response to recent anti-AAPI assaults. In Godoy’s monumental photograph, Sammy opens their arms while modestly closing their legs. The image captures the exhibition’s play between intimacy and exposure, private and public, and the shifting scales of zine, print, and mural. Issues of the artist’s zine, AMIGXS, will be available for browsing and purchase.

Camilo Godoy is an artist and educator born in Bogotá and based in New York. He has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, CUE, and Danspace Project, New York; Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt; Moody Center, Houston; Toronto Biennial; and UNSW Galleries, Sydney; among others. His work is currently on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art and in the Momentum 11 biennial, Moss, Norway.