Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Advocate & Gochis Galleries presents

ARRESTED MOVEMENT

Anthony Patrick Manieri’s portrait series and awareness initiative depicts the beauty of male subjects.

Through plain visual language this collection denies the possibility of misconception and outright rejects the reductive contemporary ideals that confine our perception of what a beautiful man should look like to what most men don’t look like.

The subjects that are captured in Arrested Movement shepherd us into their worlds as they celebrate their diverse physical forms. Their beauty is shared through the stories that their bodies tell; their scars, spots and stature are emblematic of the journeys they’ve taken in their lifetimes. The audience is welcomed as witnesses to the mental and physical spaces that they inhabit; spaces in which their (and our) beauty is unmediated, inexorable, and complete in both the presence and absence of societal opinions and gendered mainstream ideologies that insist on anything to the contrary.

By being seen and by seeing, the men in this series and its viewers are given express permission to observe the truth of their own appearances and in doing so share this truth with others beyond the confines of the exhibition. The set of photographs that compose Arrested Movement seek to illustrate that beauty is not, in fact, in the eye of the beholder nor is it found exclusively on the covers of magazines, but instead that beauty is simply a manifestation of existence.

This portrait series relegates the critical eye to a corner that is hidden in the back of the gallery, its nose fast to the wall and its opinions wholly banned from participation in the [re]discovery of the inner and outer beauty that is on full display in this sacred space.

This body of work reacquaints us with wisdom silenced by insidious external influences, a truth that is fostered by an essential logic: If we exist, then we are beautiful.