My Porn
Wallpaper, photographs, and editions
2009, 2023

This is the collection that started it all — porn downloaded from sex and social web sites starting in the late 90s. A hundred images grew to one then two thousand and inevitably the images spilled over into my studio. The archive documents the history of the selfie and the formation of a networked queer aesthetic. Moreover it’s a self-portrait without picturing me. The wallpaper is made with 1,860 images arranged in Photoshop using a contact sheet filter, pre-Google. The pattern is printed on newspaper to intentionally yellow and rip.Then I used the collection to create low-res family photograph interventions. Curator Chris Boot said “My Porn is only partly about photographs as social and sexual currency, in publicly exploring his desire for a particular photographic archetype of manhood and the male nude, Clary poignantly mines issues of sexual fiction, self-confidence and male vulnerability.”