TITLE: Bodies

When people encounter the nude in art, they often arrive with expectation already in place. They anticipate provocation, suggestion, or some form of encoded desire. But that expectation does not belong to the body itself. It belongs to the viewer. A body is not inherently sexual, it is read as sexual through conditioning, through learned association, through projection. What we call “sexual” is not an inherit truth, but an imposed interpretation. This work is an effort to interrupt that reflex.

Each image is a headless body portrait. Through camera angle and positioning, the identity marker we rely on most, the face, is removed. What remains is form, surface, structure. The body is no longer anchored to personality or narrative, but exists as something closer to material. Not anonymous, but de-familiarized.

I approached these figures the way one might approach sculpture. The body becomes something shaped and shaping at the same time. A physical structure, but also a site of authorship. We construct ourselves continuously, through posture, through presence, through how we choose to exist in space. Identity is not fixed, it is formed, adjusted, carried. The body is both the medium and the record of that process.

There is no manipulation in these images, no alterations in post-production. What is present is what was there, this was essential. The work is not about transforming the body into something else, but about seeing it without interference. Without the added noise of enhancement, distortion, or correction, just the body, as it exists.

At the same time, this work deliberately separates nudity from sexuality. I do not locate sexuality in the body itself. To me, sexuality is internal, it belongs to thought, to emotion, to psychological space. It is not something embedded in skin or form. By removing the face and stripping away

AUTHOR: chad coombs (Canada)

Chad Coombs is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, collage, and painting. His practice examines identity, perception, and the systems that shape human behaviour, often focusing on the tension between internal experience and external influence.

His work is rooted in process and material. Using analog photography, hand-constructed imagery, and direct mark-making, Coombs treats each medium as an active participant in the work rather than a neutral tool. Distortion, fragmentation, and recontextualization are recurring strategies, used to disrupt familiar ways of seeing and challenge how individuals are defined and understood.

Much of his work centers on portraiture, not as representation, but as a site of construction. Figures are often altered, layered, or destabilized, reflecting the competing forces that shape identity, including social systems, cultural expectations, and collective perception. Through this approach, his images resist fixed interpretation, instead holding tension between recognition and ambiguity.

His perspective is informed by lived experience, including autism, which functions within his practice as a method of observation and inquiry. This lens allows him to bypass conventional social framing and engage more directly with structure, behaviour, and contradiction.

Coombs’ work often rejects polished resolution in favour of immediacy and presence. Imperfections, material inconsistencies, and visible process are not corrected but integrated, reinforcing the idea that meaning is embedded within the act of making itself.

Through his work, Coombs constructs images that are both confrontational and reflective, inviting viewers to question not only what they are seeing, but how and why they see it that way.