The art of discovery
Student's art on display at new Campus Center gallery
Nicole Pfleger
Issue date: 10/31/06 Section: News
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For the first time, Rutgers-Newark students can display their own artwork on the second floor of the Paul Robeson Campus Center, and it only took one year of lobbying for the space.
Leo Selvaggio, an R-N senior and double-major in psychology and photography, said he took the fight to the Paul Robeson Gallery Director Daniel Veneziano to try and come up with a solution.
"I bitched to him about the fact there wasn't enough space for students to display their work," Selvaggio said.
But unbeknownst to him, Veneziano had been fighting the upper-level administration for over a year to find the time and space to display student artwork around the campus center.
Selvaggio then discovered that there was an administrator on his side after all. Veneziano approached him with an offer to display his work on PRCC's second floor in the beginning of September, two weeks before the work was allowed to go on display.
The pictures Selvaggio chose to display are not only a portrayal of his journey to self-growth and awareness, but a part of him as a whole. The photos were taken at the Colosseum, a gay nightclub in Sayreville, where he shot every Thursday for two and a half months.
"I was at first very anti-gay clubs, it wasn't my style," Selvaggio said. "Always having felt like an outsider in the gay community, I chose to do a photo essay on gay club culture because the project forced me to confront the social hub so prevalent to gay people in this part of the country: a place filled with alcohol, swirling lights, pounding music, seductive Go-Go dancers, and sexual tension: a club," he said.
Most of the people captured in his photographs are those he saw regularly. Other people were just one times shots. "I just shot what I saw around me," Selvaggio said.
If you ask Selvaggio, he was not there simply to make photographs; he was there to convince himself, yet again, that he did not belong.
"I went with the purpose of exposing the nasty putrid underbelly of gay club culture of which I believed I was not a part of: anonymous sex, drinking until being floored, sex enhancing poppers and drugs, loneliness, and the pursuit of a Ken Doll figure to the detriment one's own health," he explained.
Leo Selvaggio, an R-N senior and double-major in psychology and photography, said he took the fight to the Paul Robeson Gallery Director Daniel Veneziano to try and come up with a solution.
"I bitched to him about the fact there wasn't enough space for students to display their work," Selvaggio said.
But unbeknownst to him, Veneziano had been fighting the upper-level administration for over a year to find the time and space to display student artwork around the campus center.
Selvaggio then discovered that there was an administrator on his side after all. Veneziano approached him with an offer to display his work on PRCC's second floor in the beginning of September, two weeks before the work was allowed to go on display.
The pictures Selvaggio chose to display are not only a portrayal of his journey to self-growth and awareness, but a part of him as a whole. The photos were taken at the Colosseum, a gay nightclub in Sayreville, where he shot every Thursday for two and a half months.
"I was at first very anti-gay clubs, it wasn't my style," Selvaggio said. "Always having felt like an outsider in the gay community, I chose to do a photo essay on gay club culture because the project forced me to confront the social hub so prevalent to gay people in this part of the country: a place filled with alcohol, swirling lights, pounding music, seductive Go-Go dancers, and sexual tension: a club," he said.
Most of the people captured in his photographs are those he saw regularly. Other people were just one times shots. "I just shot what I saw around me," Selvaggio said.
If you ask Selvaggio, he was not there simply to make photographs; he was there to convince himself, yet again, that he did not belong.
"I went with the purpose of exposing the nasty putrid underbelly of gay club culture of which I believed I was not a part of: anonymous sex, drinking until being floored, sex enhancing poppers and drugs, loneliness, and the pursuit of a Ken Doll figure to the detriment one's own health," he explained.
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