Joey Strella

Another Gallery is pleased to present *huff huff plap plap*, a group of new drawings by Joey Strella. The artist’s first exhibition with the gallery depicts familiar figures coming together in private, yet public, expressions of gay desire. In this imaginative universe, brand mascots concocted in corporate marketing departments are freed from their obligations to sell products and are given over to the unproductive hedonism of sex in a back room.

This exhibition expands upon the created world which the artist has drawn, entangling the double entendre of the site that is the back room while simultaneously investigating themes of visibility, consumerism and desire, and consumption as material and subject.

Couched in the familiar aesthetics of online fan art, these drawings interrogate what is behind the popular urge to turn non-erotic subjects into the sites for sexual gratification. Using the language and materials of mainstream illustration, Strella creates a direct reference to underground comics, gay magazines, and erotica created in the mid-20th century by artists such as Tom of Finland and Mike Kuchar. Working in this mode, with a nod to history, Strella’s drawings question the collision of gay lust and capitalism.

"Are we the Silly Rabbit? What we want always slightly out of our grasp, leaving us in perpetual hunger and desire?

Or are we the kids who get to tell the Silly Rabbit that this is not for him, our desires fulfilled by consuming, the lucky ones whose needs are expressed and met?"

Joey Strella (b. 1993 in Maryland) lives and works in Los Angeles.