It's hard for me to speak (or write) about this work without tearing up. Bearing witness to these stories and spaces digs into your body. I will never forget arriving at the first location: It was a small development of apartments outside of Dallas. The second I got out of my car, my stomach turned. It was an emotion I had never felt before, a combination of deep fear for my safety and incredible loss.

-Sean Fader

Sean Fader was interviewed for ARTE Europe

I always think about social media as a tool and a weapon. Ultimately, I’m still optimistic about it. When people talk to me about how evil social media is and how much damage it is doing to people, I often notice that they are part of prevailing cultural norms. For queer people, social media is often one of the first places where we can find people to flirt with and those who celebrate our bodies and way of life. I think social media is a part of the rich history of queer communications: the smell of lavender, green carnations, Polari, hanky code, nail flagging, now Grindr, Tinder, and Instagram. It’s a way to feel seen in a cis het norm sea.

-Sean Fader

“I did this by myself and cried at every location,” Fader said. “I feared for my life sometimes and thought about the fear they must have felt, and I felt this sense of responsibility to share their stories.”

Photos from Fader’s cross-country trip along with stories about the murdered LGBTQ+ people were compiled into a Google Earth photo database for the artist’s series “Insufficient Memory,” on display at Wrightwood 659 in Lincoln Park.

Sean Fader’s photographs for Insufficient Memory (2020) require understanding that he used a Sony Digital Mavica—one of the first popular digital cameras, dating from 1998—to memorialize the locations where LGBTQ-identifying people were murdered between 1999 and 2000 … while US Congress was debating the Hate Crimes Prevention Act. The camera’s smaller digital files produce impressionistic images when printed large. On the back of each one is the narrative surrounding the death. Fader also created an online Google Map to help others learn the histories that he drove 25,000 miles around the country to discover.

-Charlotte Kent

"It is a truism to talk about how much the world has changed due to the fact that most people in the United States carry a camera with them at all times. The possibilities of quick, highdefinition photography and video have been catalytic to social movements, political activism, and geographically dispersed community formation. At the same time, the ease of digital photography has ushered in a flood of vanity, commodification, and new and virulent forms of normativity and chauvinism. With its ubiquity, the digital photograph has hypercharged the circulation and consumption of images, tipping us to a new pictographic disposition."

"I’ve compared #wishingpelt to a Trojan Horse because it was accepted gleefully as a gift, a gag, or an opportunity for humor. But within it, this work also carries unforeseen capacities for intimate confidences, shared connections, and critical views of the circulation of images as social activity. Many participants surprised themselves (and Fader) with their secret con- fessions. Others later returned to tell of the delayed personal impact of their hashtagged moment. Spectators of the performance on Instagram had the social networks of the art fair visualized by the inescapable #wishingpelt photographs that crowded their feeds. For both the IRL performance and the shared broadcast image, humor was the entice- ment and the decoy."

-David Getsy

“Queer stories are not only erased by lack of media coverage. Queer erasure happens a second round in the advent of digital technology, and our expectations that all histories are digitised”

"Sean Fader uses two photographic series to bookend a transformative two decades of LGBTQIA history through the lens of digital photography and its role in queer representation."

"In a new exhibition of work at the Denny Dimin gallery in Tribeca, Sean Fader takes a closer look at queer history and representation, homing in on the past two decades. Composed of two bodies of work shown together, the exhibition examines how digital technology has impacted the queer narrative. And although quite different in tone, both series (created in tandem) comment on the idea of archive — who has history prioritized, how are they remembered, and by whom?"

"If the original black mirror, the Claude glass, hid the artist to reveal the idealized subject, then Sean Fader’s 365 Profile Pics is its modern day progeny indeed. Despite comprising some 365 images of the artist’s face, the expansive artwork reveals very little about Fader himself, turning its lens instead onto contemporary culture, image making, and consumption."

"Fader, who’s present at the gallery most days to assist with the auto-portraiture, enacts the sharing and caring of the exhibition’s title: the optimistic desires of his original performance, based admittedly on a quirky kind of eroticism, necessarily requires its distribution online and on the gallery wall (a counterpoint here is the more enclosed intimacy of the late Adrian Howells’s work). I’m not sure the hashtag is an instrument of collective authorship, as much as it is currency for a corporate-minded smart-phone app. But in topping up Prince’s own appropriation of the performance, Fader shapes a dialogue on display value and contemporary strategies of (self)-promotion. His connections between the sentimentality of the wish, the attention of the hashtag, and the creativity of the artist are fertile in their implications, if perhaps naïve in their politics."