"Éamon McGivern (b.1990) is an artist from San Francisco who has spent the past eight years in the Bay Area painting portraits of queers, punks and poets. Recently he has been delving into the archives of 20th century LGBTQ history, picking up strands from holes in the historical narratives in attempts to darn the tears between the past and present wrought by political oppression, transphobia and the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Éamon holds a BFA with honors in Painting from the Pratt Institute and an MA in Fine Arts from the Chelsea College. While at Pratt, he spent a formative semester abroad at Musashino Art University in Tokyo studying traditional Japanese painting and printmaking techniques.
Éamon has has exhibited his work internationally and had solo shows at the Tenderloin Museum and GLBT Historical Society Museum here in San Francisco. He has been an artist in residence at the Bemis Center in Omaha, Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, Residency 11:11 in London, and now Root Division in San Francisco.
As a transgender artist, he is passionate about working with the transgender community and has hosted numerous events from panel discussions to group shows of all transgender artists, writers and academics. He believe transgender people should tell their own stories, and aims to disrupt the hegemony of the cisgender gaze in the art world."
"I am a visual artists originally from and currently based in San Francisco California. For the past two years I have been developing a series of paintings using archival images from queer archives and the private collections of our elders. Throughout this process, the concept of “living memory” has come to the forefront of my thinking. As a gay trans man who grew up in San Francisco at the height of the AIDS epidemic, I often wonder how my generation has been affected by the death of so many queer men and transgender women who would now be our parents’ and grandparents’ age. Is the loss of these people—who would have been our teachers, mentors, and parental figures—part of the reason why the recent past often feels like ancient history? I believe that the tactics of using state violence to destroy civil rights movements, including the violence of the governmental neglect of the AIDS epidemic, have broken this chain of living memory, warping our ability to contextualize our place in the flow of history. By Juxtaposing painting images of the past with paintings of my contemporary queer and trans community here in the Bay Area I seek to restore right relationship between past and present. Oil paint has been my primary medium for over a decade, a journey I began as an undergraduate student at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. While my style remains rooted in the traditional techniques of figurative oil painting, I have begun working with large stretches of untouched raw canvas in the ground of my work. This is influenced by my time studying Japanese painting and printmaking in Tokyo and the way this medium integrates the ground of the untouched paper into compositions creating unparalleled sense of light and space. It also speaks to the washed out quality often found in the archival photographs I work with. Blending signifiers of archival photography into the oil paintings allows me to play with the tension between time and timelessness felt in these two distinct visual languages. "