Beard Love

Beard Love: Videos By Sean M. Johnson
Volume One
$14.95 + Shipping
Edition of 100: Limited Copies, Get them while they last!
Beard Love: Boyhood & Play
Volume Two
$19.95 + Shipping
Edition of 100: Limited Copies, Get them while they last!
Beard Love: Like the Spice Limited Edition
$100.00 + Shipping (Edition of 10)
Set Includes Certificate of Authenticity, 3 Photographs from the show, and a limited edition of Beard Love, all wrapped up in a nice sleeved cased.
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Artist Statement
I never really thought that I would be making art and interweaving ideas of my relationship with my mother and childhood with questions and concerns about my sexuality. These two parts of my life have always been relatively (and often purposefully) separate, yet somehow recently I am quite drawn to them. I have been exploring these ideas of my family’s history, by looking at specific periods in my childhood, and the type of childhood that I shared with my two brothers (our adventures in the woods, video games, building forts, and other “normal” boy activities). The memories that my brothers and I have created have always represented a certain idea of childhood innocence and self indulgence which I really enjoy. The ideas of innocence and self-indulgence have intersected at a certain point with my sexuality, combining body aesthetics, fetishism, and meditation with indulgent childhood play.
My mother’s role is as a catalyst between the audience members and my work, where she is placed physically within the work or guides the audience through a performance. Her personality can bring a level of trust and validity to my work, yet she too is becoming my work. My father, however, has been both physically absent from my life as well as mentally absent from my thoughts. Having grown up with just my mother and brothers, I have accepted the father figure as non-existent in my life. This fatherly absence has instigated a fetishization of the father’s role in the family. I undertook a detailed study and analysis of gay ‘bear’ culture and issues surrounding the male body within bear culture. The ideals of masculinity in this group are defined by body mass and body/facial hair. A lot of men who participate in the gay bear culture fit into my emotional and mental depiction of a father, but I am also sexually attracted to their physical selves. This definitely forces the audience to consider issues of sexuality and family, and the complications behind it, but I am also interested in exploring the metaphorical idea of incest with my interest in the “Daddy Bears” and me as their “son”.
These issues that I explore that revolve around my sexuality and my perceived identity in society are constantly being obscured, expanded, defined, and complicated as I come to a deeper and more complex understanding of our society’s ideas behind family, morals, and the construction of our sexual identity.