Joel Seah has this to say in introducing his latest series of prints, “Currently, the United States is in a time when domestic gay life is being brought to visibility through the debate of same sex marriages, the process of which could change the social meaning as well as the representation of domestic life.”

It is timely that such an exhibition as Domestic Partners has come to Singapore, one that not only encourages renewed discussions about the problematic location of growing gay discourses within a predominantly straight society, but does so through a sophisticated approach that will have no problem being accepted within the legal boundaries of our country’s vigilant censorship rules.

With specific reference to gay male discourse, Seah’s main focus in this exhibition, it is hard to accept that representations of domestic life have not already been changing or appropriated to rebuild a fierce façade of normalcy in the face of homophobia bent on undermining the social inclusion of homosexuals. One of homophobia’s strategies is to colour the homosexual’s lifestyle with connotations of perversion and immorality.

In a series of six large digital prints shown at The Substation Gallery, Seah inadvertently acknowledges the status quo, in which homosexuals have long been proactive and resilient in staking their own brand of conventional social life by taking over its conventions, intensifying them with irony and a vigilant self-awareness. In each of these prints, a unique repeating pattern of countless male silhouettes is super-imposed over familiar, catalogue images of domestic spaces, creating a scrim through which these domestic settings are re-viewed; the viewer is most likely to be taken aback moving closer to realise a single printed motif links – literally – to replicates of itself so as to visually redefine the sophisticatedly inane image of a chic, urban home.

These images are taken out of catalogue pages from IKEA, Ethan Allen and Pottery Barn, while the tiny male silhouettes they are made of run about under the eye, which is unable to focus on any single one of them. These motifs seem fluid as the origins of knowledge, serving as an undercurrent of doubt to the surface imagery. This is reminiscent of Ron Silvers’s creation of photomosaics, which resulted in such artwork as the poster for the Jim Carey movie, The Truman Show, and other images such as those of Princess Diana on the cover of Newsweek and Tiger Woods on Sports Illustrated.

But instead of being made up of different smaller pictures, the motifs are the same in Joel’s prints, although positioned in different configurations that are themselves repeated to create the entire image. But the ultimate effect is similar. One is reminded of fractals or how countless variations of the same pattern emerge in ice crystals, except in this case, they are discursive units that make up a complex ideological patterning making up the final picture.

In the well-loved gay disco anthem, “Alleluia, it’s raining men”, Joel’s reinterpretation of idealised and urban living spaces seem to similarly celebrate how even such signifiers of a “normal” social existence have become (re)defined by men (and gay men at that). Designer Guys, an American home improvement series that was, funnily enough, shown on local television, shows two obviously gay guys enthusiastically expounding new interior-design ideas to real-life participants who want their homes redone. The gay male here as automatically equipped with good taste in all genres of taste, from art to architecture, may in fact already be a dated and crude generalisation that Joel does not help but also perpetuate with his prints. Indeed, the configuration of motifs can also bring to mind an infinite gridlock not unlike links in a chain, signalling an entrapment of the homosexual within the framework of the stereotype.

However, this is only the flipside of a more immediate agenda to emphasise the real war against homophobia through the overturning of ideological structures implicit in something as commonplace as the appearance of a kitchen or a bathroom.

Written for the exhibition.