Using hunting themes and camouflage patterns - quintessential icons of America’s heartland -  Steffanni builds a metaphor of the queer experience in America today by relating the idea of being stalked and targeted to the policing of queer individuals, their bodies, and their actions. 

Using strategic framing and perspective, it is often unclear whether the viewer’s point of view is as hunter, prey, or potentially both. There is a latent sense of fear and foreboding that runs throughout the artworks in the exhibition, but it is balanced with tenderness, empathy, and an emphasis on healing wounds that reopen time and again. 

The entire body of work is richly layered with meaning, texture, reference, and technique. Steffanni combines prints on handmade paper with life-size ceramics and installation, and each object attests to the artist’s sustained engagement with the work, whereby he continually experiments and tests new processes. Steffanni deftly combines his own experiences with the art historical canon; religion with pop culture; medical reports with RuPaul quotes. 

The genesis of God-Shaped Hole came from Steffanni’s exploration of his personal pain and its place within collective queer trauma. However, the works in this exhibition invite us to explore our own vulnerabilities and the wounds we each carry within. We are also asked to place ourselves within their frames, to see the world perhaps through a new lens, and to find compassion for and commonalities between our lived experiences and those of others.

Learn more about God-Shaped Hole on the Wilson Museum’s Bloomberg Connects digital guide and check out the March/April issue of AAM’s Museums magazine to see God-Shaped Hole featured in the “First Look” section.