Toothpaste

DeSana centered queer desire, gender fluidity, and S&M practices in his meticulously staged photographs. They draw on Surrealist traditions of contorted bodies and East Village, Punk aesthetics of the 1970s and 1980s. From 1980 to 1983 DeSana worked on his Suburban series, responding in part to his experience of suburbia, which included his father’s affair with a neighbor and his mother’s turn to strict Methodism. He shot these works in apartments and homes, highlighting the absurdity of consumerism and alienation from everyday chores and appliances. Tungsten lights with gel filters produce lurid colors and uncanny shadows. Here, toothpaste serves as body decoration and face mask, while the high heels and a stretched telephone cord are suggestive of kink.

Bill Olander, former curator at the Allen and co-founder of the organization Visual AIDS, acquired this work for the museum in 1981.