About
Padyn Humble is a sculptor from Montana whose practice reinterprets the intention of our cultural symbols to construct meaning through a queer perspective. Inspiration stems from various influences like old country music, pop culture, kitsch, and surrealist aesthetics. In May 2022, he earned his MFA and was awarded International Sculpture Center’s ‘Outstanding Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture’ and was featured in Sculpture Magazine February 2023. Summer of 2023, he was a resident at Wassaic Project in Upstate New York. He has been an active artist since 2014 and is now working in Berlin, Germany, where he is a mediator for the Boros Foundation. Currently, he is investigating video in tandem with his fabricated objects.
Statement
Growing up in the rural American West has shaped how I understand queerness in opposition to a landscape built on rugged individualism and Cowboy romanticism. My practice exposes the friction between queer adaptation, desire, privilege, and historic masculinity and how these forces get reproduced culturally. Theatrical longing, sentimentality, and melancholia expressed particularly in old country and pop music, film, or poetry are the models I engage with for their queer subtext or idiosyncrasies to develop my narratives and symbolic relationships. Often, I utilize the Cowboy as the main character of my work to understand how these themes can be embodied and used to tell intimate personal histories.
Drawing on the visual language of stage props, trompe l'oeil, and cartoon rendering, my work attempts to unmask the camp inside myths of the West, seeking the sensual, sexual, and absurd through a sincere surrealism. This challenges the coded language and images of Americana by highlighting the consequences that arise when intimacy, power, irony, or persona converge. Fragmenting and exaggerating the formal devices of my work suggests that the iconography and their social currency are unfixed and subject to change. My sculpture and installations utilize multiple components like assemblage, painting, video, and collage.
Email: studio.padyn@gmail.com
Instagram: @padyn