While clumsily typing on my phone, in relationship to Tom Hsu’s exhibition title, loop holes, my phone inexplicitly autocorrects my entry to the word, nefarious; i.e. outrageous, vile, vicious, odious, heinous, shameful, degenerate, corrupt, criminal, depraved, evil, flagrant. This slip gives me pause to think about the means of escape, or the laws to be evaded that Hsu title and work might propose. If this feels heavy, I use it only to establish the field of gravity to which the lightness and playfulness of Hsu’s observations orbit.

Of the twelve photographs selected for We Buy Gold, the largest photograph, Two Bananas is the alchemical center of this solar system. Here, fruit eyes comically slump exhausted over a mirror, creating a face that wryly grins back at us, a Cheshire Cat, as we look at the bare butt of a naked figure, suspended supernaturally on a huge phallus growing up from the forest floor. In Hsu’s Wonderland, looking through banana binoculars, ears speak, heads turn to gold, fingers shrimp, and the Red Glows Behind evokes the sensual heat of an extraterrestrial atmosphere, or premonition of what might happen to the butt in Tree Climber. Libidinal energy and kinship function as dark matter binding these various clusters. Fallen Tree is humorous or allegorical in relationship to Tree Climber and Shrimp Fingers evokes fingers in mouths, or the sensually stretching of what lays between Legs Crossing.

In the spirit of double entendre, the word loop could also refer to the photographer’s loupe, the small magnifier that Hsu most likely uses in his analogue approach and this evokes an image of close inspection, of the pupil held close to image. I cannot help but think of the “Fruit Machine” devised by the Canadian government to measure the diametre of the pupils for supposed erotic response, as a way to weed out gay people from civil service. This takes me back to Hsu’s proposition made by his title, and the playful freedom felt in his work, as a force challenging and circumnavigating those that seek to label our natural and beautiful desires as anything but that.

* PHOTO OF TOM HSU: Grady Mitchell