TOSH BASCO

Zürich based, American born Tosh Basco is a performance artist who works with photography and drawing to distill, complement and encapsulate her embodied practice. Her improvisational, movement-based work (sometimes under the name boychild) employs improvisation as a mode of survival and world-building, exploring the thresholds where becoming meets representation.

Adamant about the visceral experience of live visual performance, her work shows how the movement of form communicates what remains impenetrable through images and language.

ABOUT THE WORK:

First learning to shoot manually with an AE-1 CANON (a gift to the artist as a 15-year-old from her father), photography has consistently defined the shape of Tosh Basco’s life and work as a performer. Her photographic practice turns the camera on herself, her friends, and lovers, producing a raw, stark, and unfiltered intimacy. Explicitly sensual and sexual, her most recent series stems from her desire to fill the void in what she calls “good lesbian porn,” as she documents life with her lovers. In “Safi’s Pup,” Tosh poses on all fours in nude lingerie. A floor lamp is perched above her body, illuminating her backside like the white light of an interrogation chamber—but Tosh’s beckoning gaze is fixed on the viewer—she herself is doing all the questioning, reevaluating the lens through which we are seen and through which we see others.