Jimmy DeSana, Paul Mpagi Sepuya

DOCUMENT Chicago is delighted to present a two-person exhibition of photographs by Jimmy DeSana and Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Opening on January 9, the exhibition will remain on view through March 21, 2026. This intergenerational dialogue between the work of Jimmy DeSana and Paul Mpagi Sepuya unfolds as a set of carefully matched pairings. Both artists use photography to engage with queer bodies and the politics of representation, implicating the viewer as much as any figure who appears in the frame. Closely associated with New York City's No Wave and downtown art scenes in the late 1970s and employing a rich array of photographic processes, DeSana drew on Surrealism in presenting bodies in confusing entanglement with everyday objects as well as one another. Anticipating the sexual anxieties of the imminent AIDS crisis, he infused queer erotics with equal parts absurdity and dread. Beginning his career in the mid-2000s, Sepuya's work comes from his intimate involvement and collaboration with queer communities on both U.S. coasts. The desiring gaze can only take in Sepuya's bodies via fragmentation, mirroring or the clever reproduction of his previous photographs; effects meticulously produced by Sepuya in the studio rather than by any digital manipulation. Side by side, DeSana and Sepuya remind us that queer aesthetics—much like queer liberation—is a continual process, never far from the lived, corporeal world.