Surfaced: Nayland Blake & Edward Kay

Nayland Blake’s sculptures, installations and videos are well known, and address his mixed race identity (his mother is Irish- American, his father is African-America). In America Blake is seen as a black man but due to his light skin colour “passes” for white, which parallels his sexuality as a gay man who can “pass” for straight. Blake has long been associated with queer activism, and many of his historical works have addressed the issues of gay equality in America, racial equality and AIDS.

Edward Kay’s work is figurative and from an Academic style, yet conceptually based and with a knowing deconstructive nod to sexual polemics, as well as Disney.

Blake’s generation of artists working on identity have in a way cleared the ground for Kay’s generation to re-investigate paintings, ones that encompass sexual identity but are not homosexual battlegrounds. The ground have shifted and a new European generation of gay and lesbians can make work with regards to its past but no longer caught up in fights that sadly still persist in the new world.