Can I Wear This? — Proxy Permissions
Series Notes
Can I Wear This? is a portrait-based project that examines masculinity, permission, and visibility within a visual culture increasingly shaped by technological mediation. Initially conceived as an act of support for friends with non-traditional relationships to clothing, the work evolved into a broader inquiry into how men internalise, negotiate, and perform social expectations around self-presentation.
The subjects—young, aspiring fathers—occupy a fragile transitional space between inherited norms and future responsibility. Each participant wears a single item of clothing in a self-determined way, producing gestures that oscillate between playfulness and vulnerability. These quiet negotiations unfold through hands, posture, and absence rather than overt expression.
While the original portraits were exhibited over a decade ago, a series of unintended pixelated prints emerged during production and were kept despite being dismissed as technical errors. Only later did their significance become clear. The pixel, as the smallest programmable unit of digital vision, operates here as a metaphor for how masculinity is flattened, anonymised, and rendered socially legible at low resolution.
Rather than resolving identity, these images withhold it. They ask how much visual information is required for recognition, what is lost through compression, and how belief increasingly precedes clarity in contemporary image culture.