Patrick Staff. Photo by Owen Richards
Patrick Staff’s new film, “The Foundation”, shot at Tom of Finland’s rambling clapboard home in the Echo Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles, delves into the artist and gay icon’s legacy. “In my film, the Tom of Finland Foundation is revealed as an archive and a centre for the community of people who care for it,” says staff. “it’s an office but also a domestic environment, complete with an active BDSM dungeon.”
The leather-clad muscular bodies in Tom of Finland’s drawings have come to define a particular hyper-masculine representation of gay men, one that conflicts with Staff’s own queer, trans-identity. Taking up informal residence at the foundation in summer 2014, helping out with the digitisation of their collection of erotic films on deteriorating VHS tapes, he began to grapple with questions of inheritance and identity: “I feel a connection to the older generation of gay men, particularly in relation to AIDS, like I have an ‘inheritance’. But it is a complex thing.”
While participating in a prestigious programme for young filmmakers at the London-based moving-image agency, LUX, Staff took ballet lessons, and this has influenced the film. By incorporating elements of choreography and improvisational theatre techniques into his work, Staff maintains the immediacy of live performance, combined with the urgency of his own activist politics.
Taken from Sleek 45 – Silent Spring Text by Katie Guggenheim More: see other installments of our New Faces series More: Juliette Bennevoit explores the intersection of ecology and gender