Lookbook (2025) is a series of photocopy collages on archival, acid-free Japanese kozo paper embellished with hand-cut aluminum sequins presented in Plexiglas boxes. In this work, August Klintberg investigates how mass print cultures such as Thrasher, Victoria, and the International Male catalogue provide tools to shape and study queerness.
"This project returns to some of the fundamental impulses of my earliest adolescent encounters with visual culture through playfully adapting research strategies used by art historian Aby Warburg. In order to theorize relationships between historic artworks, Warburg created a series of collaged panels, gathering photographic reproductions called the “Bilderatlas Mnemosyne” (1927-1929). Similarly, Lookbook (2025) is a series of photocopy collages on archival, acid-free Japanese kozo paper embellished with hand-cut aluminum sequins. In this work I am investigating how print cultures have provided tools for me to shape and study my own sexuality and gender including diverse sources such as: the seasonal Sears catalogue, Victoria magazine, Thrasher, and the International Male catalogue, among others – all materials I encountered between the ages of roughly 12 and 14. Each of these publications has latent uses in gender-queer expressions of sexuality, desire, and worldmaking, and Lookbook creates a single photographic environment from such disparate items. I am manifesting a speculative fusion of visual sources and codes to pose the simple but profound question: “how would my life be different if I had been raised believing queerness was good rather than bad?” This question is influenced by theorist, artist, and writer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay” (1989).
The disordered, sprawling visual field of Lookbook is composed in quadrants, organized through a system of registration marks often composed of segmented found photographs from a men’s underwear catalogue. Other found images – desktop computers, car batteries, flower arrangements, luxurious domestic interiors, and so on – represent my teenaged interpretation of a prosperous and financially secure future for myself, in contrast to messages I was being told as a teenager about how sad, disenfranchised, and hopeless life as a queer person would be. Peppered throughout the composition are images of polka-dotted men’s underwear, which although vaguely clownish to me now, represented something deeply erotic for me as a teenager. The idea that something as utilitarian as underwear could be ornamented was foundational in my earliest understandings of eros. Pulling out these dots and echoing them became a strategy for embellishing the paper collages using aluminium circles (“sequins” I made myself), as well as adding another system of categorization, to log how each quadrant of paper might be refigured and reorganized.
Lookbook connects to earlier tendencies in my practice, such as the use of photocopy technology in Love Empire (2005), a wooden stage that invites audiences to make declarations of love to something or someone, which features a tiled, photocopied backdrop. The Catalogue (2021) series – another related work – uses Plexiglas boxes to frame a scattered collection of photographs documenting a hand-made garment. Found, mass-produced photographs and hand-cut sequins are deployed in the ongoing series Hair, as well as Fruit and Flowers. The title of the Lookbook series refers to collections of photos used by designers to organize a collection of garments, a series of looks, that will define a season." -AK
Biography
August Klintberg (he/him) is an artist who works in the field of art history. He is an Associate Professor at the Alberta University of the Arts, and his practice is represented by Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain. His work engages with antecedent artworks, architectures, and archives through installation, works on paper, photography, and textiles.