Photo credit: Christopher W. McDonald
Selected images from the nearly two hundred drawings and watercolors shown

May 9, 2014 – July 9, 2014

Bored Horny began in the spring of 2013 when Christopher began to move towards drawing from his background in photography. In deciding where to find his human subjects for these studies, he remembered that the Internet is almost entirely naked. For his exhibition with the JFB&B Christopher will plaster the bedroom walls with these images, leaving me to live with them for two months.

Artist Statement:

As I gathered images I found myself more and more captivated by the ones with a palpable atmosphere of boredom. And it is important to note that this is not a jab at the subjects in the images I used. I realized I was exploring a more general problem of boredom and sexuality. It is not a solo problem. Not a male problem. Nor is it a digital problem (though I think it is becoming more and more visible through social media). And I think it's only somewhat a contemporary problem.

I am certain people around the world and throughout history have always found themselves bored horny--and I think the fact that I am fairly hopeless at drawing faces and people has helped highlight this universality. By grace (!) of my hand, these subjects become thoroughly anonymous, if they weren't already in the original images. They become stand-ins and fungible. Or, perhaps, surrogates?

The only thing that is uniquely contemporary (apart from the Ikea furniture) is the fact that so many people are now able to take pictures of themselves. Throughout time pornography has with very few exceptions preserved (as so often in prostitution) a strict gap between the sexual object and the user/gazer cum businessman. In Bored Horny these distinctions collapse. The one framing the image is the one in the image. And though there may be cases in which the image was not intended for a worldwide audience, they are at least being composed by the subject who has then cast it out into the void himself. This shift--that an individual create their own image of themselves as a sexual object--is a big one. But perhaps it is a secret contributor to the Bored Horny problem. Isn't the gap between subject and other the engine of erotics? Here the mystery of how you are appearing in the other's world and view is short-circuited and you simply give to the other the image/stream of exactly how you desire them to see you. In some of these drawings, that effort is more obvious than others (See sub-series: "dick size man"). What we have here is heavy with pathos: it is the erotique pathétique. This series is far from pornographic.

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Christopher W. McDonald’s work has taken him across North America and Europe but he is always thrilled to return home to his studio and goats at his farm in Connecticut where he produces photographs, drawings, music, cheese and maple syrup. He frequently collaborates with other musicians and artists such as Ragnar Kjartansson as director of sound for Ragnar's video works, but, as a visual artist in his own right, Christopher’s work has been shown in America as well as internationally and he recently had his first museum show at the Essl Museum in Vienna. In the past, much of Christopher’s work has explored the boundary between photography and drawing, but from the perspective of the photographic medium using drawing machines he built. Bored Horny is his first project involving hand drawing and in the yearlong body of work his learning process is completely exposed much like the subjects he draws: unabashedly and sometimes embarrassingly but certainly boldly.