Tear Sheets

Tear Sheets takes its title from the torn and clipped magazine pages that are Pacifico Silano's raw material: found images from vintage gay pornographic and physique magazines, rephotographed, cropped and recomposed into new tableaux.

Working from an archive of found print media, Silano isolates gestures, colors and fragments of bodies from their original context, turning advertising and pornographic photography into images about desire, nostalgia and loss in gay culture, with the shadow of the AIDS crisis running beneath the surface of the source material. The book accompanies an exhibition of the same body of work and includes a text by curator and writer Marvin Heiferman. It was co-published by Silent Face Projects, the Brooklyn imprint, and Dashwood Books in 2016.

Silano, born in 1986, continues this method of appropriation and recomposition in later books such as I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine and Shadow Cast, both published by Loose Joints, extending the same interrogation of vintage print media into new bodies of work.