PRONE (RED ROOM)

Artist: Andrew Clark
Ghost Satellite, Lower East Side, New York

Curated and Creative Directed by Stephan Alexander

“Prone” was a surgical confrontation of masculinity — its posturing, its fragility, and its inherited scripts. Installed inside a high-gloss red gallery at Ghost Satellite on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the exhibition brought together sixteen works spanning glass, steel, wax, wood, rubber, fiber, video, and performance.

Through sculptural forms that hover between erotic object and bodily fragment, Andrew Clark examined the fallacy of gender roles and the instability of identity. Androgynous silhouettes mimicked human anatomy without resolving into it. Materials held tension — rigid steel beside pliant rubber, translucent glass against dense wax — each surface charged with erotic ambiguity.

Spatial Language: The Red Room

The gallery itself became an active participant. Lacquered in an enveloping, high-gloss red, the room amplified the sensuality and violence embedded in the work. I structured the installation as a perimeter experience: sculptures elevated on metal and wax stands — also fabricated by the artist — encircled the space like sentinels.

The central void was reserved for performance.

The result was architectural: viewers entered a contained psychological environment where confrontation replaced comfort. The red functioned not as decoration, but as pressure.

The Box

At the center of the room stood “The Box.”

For the duration of the performance, Clark stood naked inside a wooden structure measuring approximately four by eight feet. Two arm-sized openings punctured the front façade. Viewers were invited to approach, insert their arms through latex sleeves, and reach into a pair of gloves inside the enclosure.

Touch preceded sight.

After the tactile encounter, participants circled the structure. Four peepholes — positioned at varying heights and vantage points — offered partial, fragmented views into the interior. One required kneeling to the floor. Another forced a sideways lean. Each perspective was incomplete.

The performance inverted traditional power dynamics. The so-called voyeur was choreographed — directed to crouch, reach, peer, and reposition. The body inside the box was both exposed and inaccessible. Masculinity was not asserted; it was contained, examined, destabilized.

The act of looking became labor.

Material Eroticism

The sculptural works that surrounded “The Box” echoed its tension. Cast forms referenced torsos, limbs, and cavities without ever fully resolving into the human figure. Rubber suggested skin. Wax implied flesh. Steel interrupted softness with authority.

Clark uses material as language — eroticism not as spectacle, but as inquiry. The works cut cleanly into assumptions about male dominance and heteronormative strength, replacing them with vulnerability and ambiguity.

The installation positioned each object as both offering and confrontation.

Faggy Boy

The exhibition also included the video work “Faggy Boy,” based on an experience from Clark’s childhood. At twelve years old, while vacationing with his father on the New Jersey boardwalk, he asked to purchase a ring from a jewelry vendor. The response — “What, are you a faggy boy?” — became a defining rupture.

The video reinterprets that moment, exposing how archaic definitions of masculinity are inherited, enforced, and internalized. The work underscores the exhibition’s broader premise: that masculinity is not innate, but performed — policed by language and reinforced through shame.

Curatorial Framework

In curating and creatively directing “Prone,” my intention was to heighten the psychological architecture of the work — isolating the viewer within a charged environment where desire, discomfort, and confrontation coexisted.

The red room, the perimeter staging, and the central performance structure were designed to control pacing and proximity. Nothing in the space allowed passive observation. Every element asked something of the viewer.

“Prone” did not attempt to resolve masculinity. It destabilized it.

The exhibition stood as a cutting, controlled examination of the sexual body — queerness rendered not as spectacle, but as resistance and reclamation.