GAYLETTER

Ian Faden’s passion for bird watching has informed his painting, and vice versa. He obsesses over feather colorations and beak shapes with the same ardor he might describe the opacities and hues of a particular oil paint. Originally from Massachusetts, he attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and now lives and works in Bushwick. His recent paintings and drawings in two series, titled Tales, Tails, Tales & Tails and Fables for the Future, provide glimpses into a world that could be seen as post-apocalyptic or post-human, but might be better understood as post-anthropocentric. In this dimension, humans and animals have experienced a great leveling of power, all naked and attempting to survive, often on equal footing and in direct competition with one another. Instead of following a specific narrative, the work evokes a series of dream-like scenes and loose mythologies that build to form a larger paradigm in which all living beings are but creatures — people are animalistic and animals are personified — both fending for themselves amid tremendous scarcity.

Is the crow smarter than the mourning dove? The shifting hierarchy of intelligence and self-awareness is a running theme in Faden’s work. In Yes Court, a mourning dove stands before their own reflection in a cracked mirror held up by a few watchful crows. However, it is difficult to decipher whether the mirror is broken because the bird has foolishly pecked at their own self-image or if Faden has included the crack as a symbol of the bird’s moody interior mental state. …

This past November, the Friday after Election Day, We spoke with Urayoán Noel and Raquel Salas Rivera, each a Puerto Rican poet, scholar, and performer in their own right.

Urayoán called from the Bronx. His seventh book of poetry, Transversal (forthcoming), reconfigures the border between Spanish and English to create new possibilities of their arrangement, fusion, and division. Raquel called from Santurce, Puerto Rico. His eighth book of poems, While They Sleep (Under the Bed is Another Country) (2019), describes in Spanish and differently in English the grief, rage, absurdity, desire, and numbness that are the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States.

We are grateful to both poets for sharing original poetry with us. Read on, where Raquel and Urayoán discuss the historic shifts in today’s Puerto Rico, the island’s anarchist history, finding places to grow, loving Philadelphia, remembering Sylvia Rivera, and building a lineage from 
the cracks.

Maybe we could begin with an overview of what’s going on in Puerto Rico today.

Raquel: We still have the Oversight and Management Board, la Junta as we call it here, which goes above the legislature and the governor. This election follows a mass movement of a size we haven’t seen in recent history. People have compared it to Vieques. It seems to have broken through a wall, and that’s undoing a belief that has existed for a long time. I grew up hearing we were just too divided as a people, that there was no way we could come together for something. …

The Death Book continues his subversive project, with the images in the book functioning as a social mirror or projective test that mine our collective unconscious, probing the depths of what we repress and censor. Just a few days shy of the United States Presidential 2020 election, Bruce and I connected on Skype to discuss his newest book. It was a gloomy day in both Brooklyn and Toronto, a fitting backdrop for our conversation which delved into death, violence, obscenity, and the psychology of taboo.

Could you tell me about the concept for the book? Baron Books, Matthew Holroyd, contacted me. He had this concept to do a series of books on death, and ask various artists to collaborate on the concept. So mine is only the second book in the series. He let me come up with whatever idea I thought would be most interesting. And I guess I took it beyond that — literally. Like, I thought it would be a good opportunity to compile all the most severely violent and crazy imagery that I’ve made over the years. It kind of has a cumulative effect. I’ve been working in gore and splatter for quite a long time. Even before my zombie movies, I was using a lot of it in my photography and at my art openings. So when you see it all together, it’s kind of startling, but I think it’s all very consistent and it really shows how my project has always been to draw attention to how this kind of imagery is so casually promoted as capitalist fodder. …

Reno Gold has been making money from his immaculately sculpted body since he was an 18-year-old stripper in Reno, Nevada. Names he went through before he got to Reno Gold include Sebastian Valentino and Richie Rose. Now at 24, Reno has moved his talents to OnlyFans. He’s been doing it for two years, but in the last year his income on the platform has exploded. Even with the 20 percent cut the company takes, he often manages to pull in over $100,000 a month. In total he’s earned over $1.2 million. The quarantine has been a golden opportunity for Reno.

“Covid has been really good for business just because people are craving that human interaction.” Reno now resides in Miami, but he was born in Illinois. He is currently single, telling us that his number one focus is his work. “I talk to my subscribers every single day. When I wake up, I immediately check my messages, answer them, and then hit the gym. Then I come home and film. I think it’d be kind of hard to have a relationship.” When asked to give us an official job description Reno responded with “local Internet hooker” or “digital panhandler.”

Reno loves his eyes but he says, “my dick brings me the most pleasure, so he’s gotta be my favorite.” Reno has plenty of fantasies, and he’s been lucky to fulfill some. “I actually lived out one of my fantasies a couple of years ago when I was traveling to Paris.” …